So chances are someone has documented this before, but I discovered it by accident, and figured it might interest a few people. Note that it requires you to have a networked printer; I've found it to work properly on every printer I've tried, laser and inkjet. The steps:

1) Ascertain the IP address of your printer
2) Choose a browser and go to http://IP_address:9100

For example, if your printer is 192.168.1.100, you'd visit http://192.168.1.100:9100. This works because most modern networked printers will try to directly interpret plaintext data thrown at their sockets, thus the GET request pushed out by your browser is printed verbatim.

Frequently Asked Questions

a) What does this do?
This directly prints the headers that your browser normally sends to internet servers to request pages and content. A sample output might look like this:

Code:


b) How can I find my printer's IP?
If it's not a networked printer, you can't. You can only do this if you plug an ethernet cable directly into your printer. If you don't, you probably can't do this (could someone with a usb print server test it please?).

c) What can it be used for?
Directly seeing things like the User-Agent that your browser sends to websites. It's more fun than useful, although I suppose it could come in handy if you want to know your agent without googling for a site that will echo it back to you.

nice find

This may sound n00bish, but what does this do?

And how do I find my Printer's IP address?

I second this. It may be helpful to describe
a)what it does and
b)what it can be used for.
because i am quite lost...

Edit: added this stuff to the first post.

a) What does this do?
This directly prints the headers that your browser normally sends to internet servers to request pages and content. A sample output might look like this:

Code:


b) How can I find my printer's IP?
If it's not a networked printer, you can't. You can only do this if you plug an ethernet cable directly into your printer. If you don't, you probably can't do this (could someone with a usb print server test it please?).

c) What can it be used for?
Directly seeing things like the User-Agent that your browser sends to websites. It's more fun than useful, although I suppose it could come in handy if you want to know your agent without googling for a site that will echo it back to you.

Or you could just use one of the variety of extensions/plugins for firefox/IE that log all HTTP requests (which has the advantage of then revealing cookies and the like).

@clementop, Groene07, others: If you don't know what this is or why it is useful, then you have no use for it. Don't worry about it.