Passthrough Parallel Port on Proxmox

I have an old Arlabs Eprom+ programmer that uses the old style printer port to connect to a computer. I've been using a vintage Compaq Armada E500 laptop running Windows 2000 as the host computer as it is the only laptop I have left with a parallel port. Unfortunately with the changes to SMB over the years it is a pain to get network file share working with it and my newer servers. Also it is getting a bit old and I don't like my changes for when it packs it in.

So, long story a bit shorter, Several of my servers still have a parallel port and one of them is setup as a Proxmox host. It's pretty straight forward to passthrough the parallel port to a virtual machine and allow access to my eprom programmer. Note: USB to parallel port converters don't work for bit bashed port interfaces.

It did require a command line config but pretty trivial to do.

Find the parallel port (ls /dev/parport*), if no result then load the parallel port driver (modprobe ppdev, and add it to /etc/modprobe so it's still there after a reboot).

then qm set vmid -parallel0 /dev/parport0 (match the port number to you hardware and vmid to your vm)

That's it, the parallel port should now be useable from your vm.