I had a Brother printer that died and I removed the motherboard. (MFC-490CW) It has a color LCD, LAN, 2 USB ports, wireless, compact flash port, SD port, a speaker, phone port with keypad, and more. I can Telnet into it and can see a limited command set from the proprietary printer program that is running. I can't seem to get to the underlying LINUX O/S.
Does anyone have an idea of how I can stop the program and get into LINUX?

Thanks
P

These are the commands I can get to within the running program ....

ENET Ethernet Parameters
FRee Memory Available
FTP FTP Parameters
IF Interface functions
IP LPD/TCP/Telnet Parameters
LLMNR Linklocal Multicast Name Resolution Parameters
LLTD Link Layer Topology Discovery Parameters
LOAd Firmware update Parameters
LPD LPD Protocol Parameters
MDNS mDNS Parameters
NETBIos NetBIOS Parameters
NETSCan Network scan Parameters
PCFAX PC fax receive Parameters
PORT Port Parameters
RAWPort RAWPort Parameters
REMOTESEtup Remote Setup Parameters
SERVEr Server Parameters
SERVIce Service Parameters
SNMP SNMP Parameters
TELnet Telnet Parameters
TEStpage Print test Page
TFtp TFTP Parameters
VErsion Server Version
WLan WLan functions
WEBServices Web Services Parameters

Yeah, that looks pretty proprietary... no idea.

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• davy's Github Repo's rescue-dg

Does anyone know of a good forum for help in hacking embedded devices? I really would like to use this mobo for a NAS. I can FTP and TELNET to it but cant get to the shell. I also have the admin password "access" but still can break through.

I downloaded a firmware upgrade for the printer "BrMain450.exe" from Brother to see if I could reverse engineer it to find the OS. I was pretty sure it was LINUX. I ran "strings" on it and saw a bunch of Windows calls and nothing about LINUX, and then I ran "hexdump" and then I ran "binwalk" on the hexdump output file. Sure enough, binwalk lists LINUX Flash File System big endian little endian info.

I have spent several days trying to get to the shell. I am becoming obsessed.

Help me ...

Not a forum, but maybe they know, where you can ask: http://hackaday.com/
Some German forum: http://www.mikrocontroller.net/
Or maybe here: http://openwrt.org/


What board do you have? (CPU, RAM, Flash,... )
Is there a serial port on the board?

Hi Sushi,
Thanks so much for the info. I will check out all of the sites you mentioned.

The board I have is from the Brother multifunction printer. I googled the memory chips and it appears to have 256MB ram and 512MB of flash. There is a large cpu size chip that has "Japan Risotto j501 lt8404" on it and I can't find anything on that. There are a dozen I/O connections for printer stepper motors, ink sensors, lid open sensors , etc. I have looked near the processor for serial like ports but nothing is obvious.

I really would like to figure this out. There are millions of smart printers that are already wireless and could be used as cheap home servers.

P

check out this
http://wiki.freegeekarkansas.org/fgar/Lexmark_N2050_Wifi_Card_Hack