Recent upgrade broke my canon printer

[Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com>]

I have a canon printer that has been working with debian and the canon
supplied packages for quite a while
Recent upgrades broke the printer is now the captstatusui gives me:

Communication error

Check the followings:
-Is the printer turned on?
-Is the cable correctly connected?

Since I have fortunately me old roots backup I could boot from that
and one difference I see is that the old system had
    $ ls -l /dev/usb/lp0 /dev/lp0
    crw-rw---- 1 root lp   6, 0 Jul 31 21:34 /dev/lp0
    crw-rw---- 1 root lp 180, 0 Jul 31 21:36 /dev/usb/lp0

New system does not have the /dev/usb/lp0 (It has the lp0)
I tried making it by hand with
$ mknod lp0 c 180 0
in /dev/usb directory

but still the same error.

I am hopeful that this is the location of the error because when
/dev/usb/lp0 is softlinked to /dev/usb there is no error (and no
normal Printer ready message).  Of course this softlink is unlikely to
work given that the device numbers are different.

Still it seems to indicate that the problem is around this file/device

Rusi