We at PaperCut are huge fans of the Mozilla Firefox web browser, and the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. We all use these products internally everyday.

Not only do they provide a great user experience, you’re not as susceptible to the viruses and spyware that plague the Microsoft products.

If you’re not using these products now … then start!

To help promote these great products we’ve put links on our emailStripper page (which gets plenty of hits), and also on the footer of our blogs below.

We’ve only had these links on the site, and we’re already ranked 179 on the SpreadFirefox Top referrers page and rising fast. We’re happy to try to promote these products any way we can, but it’s also nice to get this recognition!

(PS: Coincidently, I’m wearing my Firefox T-Shirt today too!)

OK, the blog is back looking quite close to what it used to. Chris’ blog is still running the old style, if you want to compare the differences.

I’ve implemented the new style using the new WordPress 1.5 templating system, which will make things easier to upgrade in the future. It should also be much easier to share a template between blogs just with a symlink to another blog’s theme directory. This should make it much simpler to keep all the PaperCut blogs looking the same and result in less maintenance over time.

Thanks again to the WordPress dev team for such a great product.

WordPress 1.5 was released this week, and I’ve only just found the time to upgrade. The upgrade process was a breeze.

I’m still running the default theme, so all I need to do now is to apply re-apply the PaperCut Software template. I’m wondering whether it’s worth creating a PaperCut theme, or just hack the template like we did previously. The themes seem to be a more manageable solution, but it’s probably a bit more work too. I guess it’s something to investigate over the next few days.

I’m currently using the excellent Eclipse Java IDE for development work, and using the Jetty Launcher plugin to enable firing up the Jetty web server within Eclipse. It allows you to debug your web application directly in the IDE, making Java web development much smoother.

Unfortunately the current version of the Jetty Launcher does not work with the latest Jetty release (5.1), and Jetty 5.0 doesn’t seem to be available for download anymore. I searched the issue database at SourceForge and found that the issue had been reported by Marino Jonsson, and he suggested a possible fix. But there was no response from the project owner. The plugin is open source, so I figured I should get the source, code up the fix and build the project for myself.

I haven’t done any Eclipse Plugin development, so it took some fiddling with the Ant build.xml to get the plugin to build (the Eclipse jars could not be found when compiling). The result is a jettylauncher.jar that you can drop into your Jetty Launcher 1.2.1 directory and overwrite the old one (in [eclipsedir]/plugins/com.iw.plugins.jettylauncher_1.2.1).

Download the fixed Jetty Launcher (jettylauncher.jar)

If you’re interested in what I changed, here’s the unified diff …

diff -u -r1.9 Utils.java
--- Utils.java	29 Aug 2004 16:42:37 -0000	1.9
+++ Utils.java	17 Feb 2005 12:21:53 -0000
@@ -29,6 +29,8 @@
import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.lang.reflect.Field;
+import java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException;
+import java.lang.reflect.Method;
import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;
import java.net.URLClassLoader;
@@ -303,7 +305,8 @@
*/
public static String getJettyVersionString(File jarLocFile)
throws MalformedURLException, ClassNotFoundException,
-		InstantiationException, IllegalAccessException, NoSuchFieldException
+		InstantiationException, IllegalAccessException, NoSuchFieldException,
+        NoSuchMethodException, InvocationTargetException
{
ClassLoader currentClassLoader = null;
currentClassLoader = Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader();
@@ -314,10 +317,20 @@
URLClassLoader jarClassLoader = URLClassLoader.newInstance(
new URL[]{jarLocFile.toURL()}, currentClassLoader);
Class versionClass = jarClassLoader.loadClass("org.mortbay.http.Version");
-		Object version = versionClass.newInstance();
-		Field versionImplField = versionClass.getField("__VersionImpl");
-		String versionString = (String)versionImplField.get(version);
-		return versionString;
+
+        String versionString;
+
+        try {
+    		Object version = versionClass.newInstance();
+    		Field versionImplField = versionClass.getField("__VersionImpl");
+    		versionString = (String)versionImplField.get(version);
+        } catch (NoSuchFieldException e) {
+            // This must be Jetty 5.1+
+            Method method = versionClass.getMethod("getImplVersion", null);
+            versionString = (String) method.invoke(null, null);
+        }
+
+        return versionString;
}

/**




Today we were contacted by a customer who installed PaperCut version 1 back in 1999. Their original PaperCut install had run fine all this time until they upgraded the server to Windows 2003. Version one was originally designed for Windows NT so I’m not surprised it didn’t work on Windows 2003! Anyway they’ve upgraded to the latest and greatest 5.2 release ready for the next 6 years!

Anyone else is out their on PaperCut version 1 (back then known as Print Charger)? If so, send us an email. We’d love to hear from you… and help you upgrade to PaperCut 5.2!

We’re experimenting with a new live web chat feature on the PaperCut website and knowledge base. The idea is that it might help turn around those quick questions people have in a more efficient manner. We’re manning the live chat for a 12-hour period each day for the next month to gauge it’s usefulness. If we’re online, you’ll see a flashing live chat image on the contact us page. It’s been up for a few days and already we’ve helped solve a few support problems and sales queries.

The live chat feature is fully web based and requires no additional software or plug-ins. Thanks to the guys at Crafty Syntax Live Help for the great software.

If you’d like to talk we me or any of the other people at PaperCut Software, why not try out our live web chat!

An Internet or Web Proxy is one of the most important applications on a large network. It allows you to

• track user’s internet usage
• save on bandwidth costs through content caching
• limit user access to irrelevant or objectionable content

If you’re running PaperCut, and want to make use of Internet Quotas, then you will need a proxy server that logs the Internet usage and user names to a log file.

Squid Proxy is one of the best proxies out there, and is available for no cost, however it’s designed to run on Linux/Unix machines. This often poses a problem if you’re running a Windows Active Directory, because you can’t get Squid to authenticate users before giving them access to the Internet.

Fortunately, Squid comes with some utilities to solve this problem. The Squid LDAP authentication helpers allow you to authenticate users in an LDAP directory and even assign access rights based on their LDAP group membership.

So what’s this got to do with Microsoft Active Directory?! Well Active Directory is actually an LDAP v3 compliant directory, so it can be queried across a network from any LDAP compliant applications, including Squid.

Working with Ryan Brinch (one of our customers), we’ve written a how-to guide to configuring Squid to authenticate with Active Directory.

It details the configuration changes you need to make to squid.conf in order to use the Squid LDAP helpers (ldap_auth and squid_ldap_group) to authenticate with Active Directory.

This is a much easier way to get Squid/Windows authentication to work without having to install and configure Samba and Winbind … and you don’t need your Squid server to be a member of your domain. It’s much simpler!

Hopefully that helps you out. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or suggestions.