We often get requests from customers that want to be notified when we release new versions. They want to run the latest version to take advantage of all the new features (without having to check our web site every week).

So today I added news feeds to the website to notify you as soon as a release is available. There are news feeds for both PaperCut NG and PaperCut ChargeBack and are available from the release history and download pages. For the impatient, here are the feed links:

• PaperCut NG Releases
• PaperCut ChargeBack Releases

News feeds are a great way to keep up-to-date with blogs and news. To subscribe to a news feed you need to use a news reader (or aggregator) which is a piece of software (or web site) that retrieves news items from all sites your are subscribed to and notifies you when you have unread items.

Both Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 have built-in feed readers, but they are pretty basic. If you’re interested in something more powerful we highly recommend Google Reader. All the developers at PaperCut use Google Reader daily to keep up-to-date with what’s new in the world.

Happy news reading!

I’ve just uploaded another build of the Net Control module. This release includes a number of changes:

• Add “enable/disable user net usage” option to the bulk user action page, so this setting can be set on users in bulk.
• Add support for the MS ISA Server log format, in addition to the preferred W3C log format.
• Improved detection of the latest log file based on the specified log file mask.
• Improved behaviour when processing MS ISA log format, when the W3C log format is specified in PaperCut.
• Do not log net usage performed by Squid users that haven’t authenticated correctly.
• Fix to error that occurred when running a transaction log report that contained Internet usage transactions.
• Fix bug in Linux installer that caused the Internet service config file to be overwritten when upgrading from a previous version.
• Improved the setup of the Internet Provider service on linux to warn the user if the specified log file directory is not readable.
• Add a config option to enable LDAP referrals.
• All the many changes included in the most recent public release of PaperCut NG 6.3. For more information see the release history page.
• Other small fixes.

You can download the latest release (Build 4006) from the Net Control module testing page. To upgrade from a previous release you can perform an install over the top procedure.

I’ve just uploaded another build of the Net Control module. This release includes the following changes:

• All the changes included in the most recent public release of PaperCut NG 6.2. For more information see the release history page.
• Other small fixes.

You can download the latest release (Build 3909) from the Net Control module testing page. To upgrade from a previous release you can perform an install over the top procedure.

I’ve just uploaded another build with a few small fixes and changes, including:

• Allow the internal admin password to be changed from within the user interface (on the Options->Advanced) tab.
• In the Internet Usage logs screens, allow the results to be sorted by the “MB received (ex cached)” column.
• Fix error that can occur when saving groups if only the Internet Control module is enabled.
• Other small fixes.

You can download the latest release (Build 3858) from the Net Control module testing page.

Just touching base to let you know that we’ve released a new build that includes a number of changes (a number as a result of feedback from our testers). The testing has been going well. We’ve had no reports of any major problems. Most of the comments have been about feature suggestions or usability suggestions.

You can download the latest release (Build 3853) from the Net Control module testing page.
The latest build include the following changes:

• Allow the Internet usage for a single user to be disabled for a specific amount of time or indefinitely (time latches). This can be useful to discipline students who have abused Internet privileges, but you still want them to be able to print.
• Allow data costs to be defined “per gigabyte” in addition to “per megabyte”
• Allow the user client window position to be changed. This allows multiple user clients to be run when different PaperCut instances host Net and Print control.
• Clarify some of the terminology to make it easier to understand whether data includes cached data or not.
• Ignore machine accounts (e.g. username$) in proxy logs. These entries are recorded when a Windows machine downloads Windows updates.
• Improved LDAP support for large sites.
• Licensing changes to allow users who are registered for Print Control to be able to trial the Net Module for 40 days.
• Bumped the version number to 7.0.
• All the updates included in the latest 6.2 release (see here for full details).

We just released an updated Windows build of the Net Control release that includes a fix for using domain groups when PaperCut is running on a member server. The problem was that PaperCut was only listing local groups in the setup wizard, so domain groups could not be used. If you were running PaperCut on a domain controller then the domain groups will list correctly, and there is no need to update.

You can download the latest release (Build 3816) from the Net Control module testing page.

Wow, it’s been a very long time since my last post… I am alive!

We’ve been really busy over the past few months making PaperCut NG even better, and just released version 6.1. It adds a number of often requested features like LDAP, but some of the best improvements have been under the covers in the User Client, including:

• Much faster print notifications
• Much improved scalability when running thousands of clients simultaneously
• Reduced bandwidth usage
• More robust when the client can’t connect to the server upon startup

We had a client running the User Client on almost 2000 workstations simultaneously!! And this was putting considerable load on the PaperCut Application Server, so we had to rethink our approach. The result was a large re-write of the client and the code on the server that handle client connections. If you’re a software developer and you’ve ever ever had to do this type of optimization, you’ll know that it’s quite tricky. You’ll also know that the bottlenecks are often not where you thought they would be.

But the effort was worth it!

The client now consumes very little bandwith (10% of the bandwith it did previously), the print notifications are almost instantaneous, and the server handles thousands of simultaneous connections without breaking a sweat.

… anyway … back to work!

It’s been a while since my last blog … so I thought I’d make do an update on my series about configuring Squid proxy.

This time I’m going to concentrate on SquidNT, which is a version of Squid compiled for Windows, that come with some useful helpers to allow authentication with Windows and Active Directory.

The key advantages of SquidNT, when compared to Squid on Linux/Unix are:

• A bit easier to get going if you’re not familiar with Linux/Unix
• You can configure Windows authentication more simply, and your users will be authenticated automatically without being prompted for their username/password.
• Don’t need to know how to install/compile Unix applications (We’ve had customers whose Linux distribution did not include the latest version of Squid and had troubles authenticating with Windows. Getting an unsupported version of Squid onto the distribution proved difficult.)

The major problem with SquidNT, is that the installation documentation is hard to come by. Although the core Squid documentation is good, the Windows specific documentation is not easy to find… so hopefully my article will help.

So if you’re interested in running Squid on Windows, then read my article: Installing and Configuring SquidNT. If you have any questions, then feel free to get in touch.

(If you want to use Squid on Linux/Unix and authenticate with Active Directory, then my previous article is the best place to start.)

There are about 250,000 members of SpreadFirefox, and we’re currently 10th in the SpreadFirefox rollcall.

It probably won’t last long … and it might not happen again … but here’s proof.

I’ve never heard of Kim Komando, but apparently she’s a radio show host in the US with a huge following. On the weekend she recommended our free tool, emailStripper. emailStripper strips those annoying >>>>> characters from emails that have been forwarded too many times. We wrote emailStripper about 5 years ago and its popularity never ceases to amaze us, getting thousands of downloads each month.

On the day emailStripper was recommended on Kim’s “site of the day”, we received about 13,000 unique visitors and used about 2.3 GB of bandwidth (and the day isn’t over yet). This is about 8-10 times our normal Sunday traffic of 1200 visitors and 250MB of bandwidth.

A side effect of this traffic was that our SpreadFirefox ranking jumped. Last time I checked we were 11th! Obviously many of Kim’s listeners took our recommendation of Mozilla Thunderbird and Firefox seriously.