PaperCut Blog / News

Writing blog posts are hard for us “computer geeks” in the PaperCut development team. We’re able to string together lines of source code like we’ve been doing it since we were born, but asking us to join enough English words into sentences and paragraphs to construct a blog post… now that’s a different story. All the grammatical rules, spelling, making things interesting… it’s bound to end in disaster!

So like all good software developers we decided there must be a better way. After some use-case analysis, story boarding and excessive coffee consumption we’ve determined that the answer is twitter – also known as micro-blogging. Twitter limits us to 140 characters. Surely we can’t write anything boring or grammatically incorrect in such short posts (ed: we do our best)

Yes, we’ve decided to take the plunge start tweeting. In the spirit of twitter we’ll keep you updated on all things PaperCut: The important (new software releases), the relevant (which features we’re working on), and the not so important (what we’re having for lunch on Fridays!).

If you’re on twitter, follow us on @PaperCutDev and join in the fun. Oh, don’t worry, we’re not abandoning macro-blogging just yet. You’ll need to put up with computer geek grammar, spelling and exciting posts about the 10 benefits of print audit software in business for a little bit longer!

… now I assume I should tweet this blog post?

Image “Male Western Bluebird (Sialia mexicana)” by Kevin Cole / CC BY

Measure twice, cut once – That is an adage that is familiar to many IT professionals that are responsible for deploying software that affects network infrastructure and user policies. Thorough testing of an application prior to deployment can be a crucial factor in the overall success of a project. In some cases license restrictions can limit the ability to test an application completely, but that’s not a problem with PaperCut. Our license is designed to allow you to test every aspect of our print control software prior to implementation.

Anyone wishing to conduct performance, functionality or “what if” testing can download the latest version from the PaperCut download page. This is the same version of PaperCut that is used by over 30,000 sites worldwide when they upgrade to the current version. At the end of the 40 day trial period you will be prompted for a license key when you open the PaperCut Admin Console. The printing managed by PaperCut will continue to work just as it did during the trial period, however many of the PaperCut administrative and print reporting capabilities will be disabled until a valid license key is entered.

The trial version is primarily used by prospective customers to evaluate PaperCut, but some sites go into production during the trial. I know this because one of the questions that I am asked most frequently is if the configuration and print log data from the trial will be retained in the permanent version. I love hearing that sigh of relief when I tell someone that it only takes about 10 seconds to register the license and they will be off and running with everything intact! Some folks wait until after the trial license has expired before they contact us. No problem, PaperCut keeps tracking after the 40 day license has expired and all of the information will be current when the license key is entered.

Sites that have purchased PaperCut do not need to buy an additional license for testing. A test server can be set up with either the trial license or the purchased license. Uses include testing with different operating systems, new versions of PaperCut and new network configurations. In addition, the purchased license can be installed on multiple servers during a server migration. This eliminates the need to uninstall or decommission the previous PaperCut installation before activating the new server.

If you need additional time to test or evaluate PaperCut, or if you have a situation that requires additional flexibility in order to be fully tested in your environment, please contact support and we will issue you an extension license that will allow you to complete your testing.

Image “Measuring Up” by lowjumpingfrog / CC BY

Is SSL a rusty lock?

Ah … my tax time again! What a complicated mess that is! “Enjoyment” only matched by one thing: Managing web server SSL certificates and dealing with the corresponding certificate authorities!

As PaperCut system administrators like Geoff from Colorado, John from Illinois or Robert from Iowa have recently found, managing SSL certificates can end up making doing your taxes look fun. This is in no small part due to the bureaucratic nature of the so-called X.509 and PKCS standards, which are as onerous as their names make them sound! Further more, it’s exacerbated by the shenanigans of “certificate authorities” – those self-proclaimed guardians of Internet security that have somehow conspired with Microsoft and Mozilla to create a protection racket that charges each web master hundreds of dollars* for their web site to come up “green”… for a year only… then rinse, and repeat.

Not befitting its central role in The Grand Scheme of All Things Internet, the list of 20 or so certificate authorities dividing this booty remain sheepishly hidden in the deeper folds of Windows under
Control Panel -> Internet Properties -> Content -> Certificates -> Trusted Root Certification Authorities.
System administrators wanting to provide validated HTTPS access to PaperCut’s end-user web pages (where users can perform various print management tasks) will have to create an SSL key for their domain. This key must be signed by one of these authorities.

The instructions in PaperCut’s manual on how to import SSL certificates trying to be as general as possible to accommodate all certificate authorities. However that doesn’t prevent some of them from making system administrators’ lives extra difficult by inflicting distractions such as:

Expired/changed root certificates: A certificate authority’s root certificate is normally created once and maintained for ‘life’ – where ‘life’ means ‘decades’ – certainly a long time on the Internet. This justifies the arduous process of distributing it to all operating systems, browsers, mobile devices etc. in the first place and ensures its integrity through broad public availability. Some authorities have nonetheless taken to signing customers’ keys with new root certificates long before the old established ones had expired.

Being a cross-platform solution, PaperCut maintains a list of root certificates independently of the operating system. These certificates are used to ensure integrity of the certificate chain. A new root certificates may or may not have reached wide circulation and in particular, may or may have not made it into PaperCut’s list. In case it didn’t, it is the system administrator’s responsibility to obtain the new root certificate from the authority and install it with the help of the command line provided in the manual.

Intermediate certificates: As an additional layer of bureaucracy, some certificate authorities sign customers’ keys with an intermediate certificate which in turn is signed with the root certificate. These intermediate certificate usually have shorter life times than root certificates, exist in larger numbers – several per authority – and although also mandated to be present in PaperCut’s list are less likely to be included in it to begin with. If an intermediate certificate has been used, it must also be installed as above.

Other formats: Like a siren luring the errant wanderer into the treacherous swamps of eternal doom the certificate authority might tempt the customer with certificates presented in ‘additional’ formats like PKCS#7. PKCS#7 promises to simplify the certificate import process by bundling the customer’s certificate with intermediate certificates which can be imported in one go. This may or may not work, but one thing’s for sure, it’s one more condition to lead to more confusion!

At this point the inclined system administrator may start to question the logic behind all this. My advice in the interest of avoiding a headache and maintaining overall health and sanity is: Don’t! As with all thing imposed on one from above, be it taxes or X.509, the best thing one can do is smile and play along.

Whew! Now back to those taxes …

Lock and chain image from Bala on Flickr / CC-BY-SA

42 Printer Languages and Counting

Since joining the PaperCut team, I have mainly been working on the area of PaperCut responsible for the analysis of print jobs. I have come from a background of programming in the computer language, C, doing file system programming in the Linux kernel. I worked for SGI on the XFS file system team. The job analysis code in PaperCut is entirely written in C which has given me a chance to sink my teeth into something quickly. Luckily for me it is also well written C code and has been designed to be easily extended for new print languages and print drivers.  Every few weeks printer manufactures release new print drivers and these need to be tested with PaperCut.  Changes are always occurring.  Sometimes these changes are minor and just a little bit of tweaking is required, while others are a lot more complex. In some cases we need to support whole new print languages.

Many of the lower cost printers these days are using GDI drivers.  These are drivers that don’t support known popular standards like PCL or PostScript and implement their own protocols – often not documented nor following any existing standard. In order to handle new GDI printer languages, it’s a bit like playing a game of detectives. By reverse engineering, we try out various sample documents, changing different page attributes and work out how the driver encodes the various attributes (e.g. duplex, gray-scale and paper-size). We have a set of pattern tools and a few techniques that help us perform this decoding process.  After a bit of teeth pulling we develop an algorithm to support the new driver.  The techniques are in some ways similar to those implied in reverse engineering file system formats!

After we’ve made changes to our print analysis code, we run our analyzer tool over a corpus of over thousands of real-world documents to ensure we haven’t introduced any regressions (steps backward).  The tools also check for memory leaks and test performance against previous test runs to make sure the software is not getting slower.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the behind the scenes look into some of the technical workings here at PaperCut. For a less technical look, make sure you check out what print management has to do with Coffee?

42 Image from Answer To Life / CC-BY-SA

A Printing Press

When counted by number of pages printed, most printing still takes place on printing presses like the one on the right.

The following table and pie chart, based on numbers from an American Printer article, show the state of the US printing industry in 2004.

Printing Industry by Segment

Within this slow-moving industry there have been dynamic pockets of rapid growth and the adoption of modern technologies for the last 25 years. One of these has been digital printing.

Chester Carlson

My employer was one of many small companies thriving in the market opened by the cheap Apple LaserWriter PostScript laser printer in 1985 and the cheap desktop publishing applications created by Apple, Adobe and other development companies. This market remains vibrant as work that was previously done in other parts of the printing industry moves to digital color printing and more corporate printing moves in house as office printers and office software becomes more capable. (There was a parallel and related trend of growth built around home computer printing and drop on demand (dod) inkjet technology but this post will focus on graphics and office printing.) A brief history of digital printing follows.
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I was recently helping a customer with a couple of reporting questions they had and they mentioned that they were going to be rolling out 20 new printers in the near future. I commented that this would require quite a bit of work, lugging hardware around, changing printer drivers etc. They agreed and then said that the worst of it was setting the static IP addresses of all of the new devices.

Having had to manage rollouts of small to large sizes I’ve come across this problem before and luckily found two features of a Microsoft DHCP server that can save a lot of time.

DHCP Reservations

Ultimately there is no difference between a static IP address and a DHCP allocated IP address that doesn’t change. The results are the same, you connect to the IP address and the same device is there each and every time. This is essential for servers, switches, routers, printers and more. In many cases setting the device to use a static IP address is suitable and possibly even best practice (routers in large networks for example).

However, if you have a large number of devices that require non-changing IP addresses, why not set your DHCP server to always give out the same IP address each time the device turns on or refreshes its IP address? Simply open your DHCP management interface (I’ll assume Windows here) and navigate to your Scope and then Reservations. From here you can create new reservations and all you will need is the MAC address from the printer. For example: 00:1D:09:FE:64:04 is converted to 001D09FE6404 and given then IP address of 10.1.1.12. Set the printer to DHCP assigned address and give it a moment.

A couple of seconds later you should be able to communicate with the printer on the new IP address.

The benefits of this are quite easy to see, imagine if you had to send a printer to a remote office where there are no tech-savvy users. Grab the MAC address of the printer, create a new DHCP reservation, create the new print queue and share it out. When the printer gets out there, simply get someone to plug it in to power and network and you’re done.

If you replace the device (hardware does fail unfortunately), simply change the MAC address in the reservation then replace the old hardware. No fiddling with the interface panel on the printer required.

DHCP import/export

“That’s nice.” I hear you say, “But it doesn’t help with these 20 devices, I’m at the printer anyway, might as well do the time there.”

This is quite valid, except you can export/import DHCP settings via the command line enabling you to use your favourite spreadsheet program to manipulate the data.

Running the following command will give you a simple dump of the existing DHCP setup.

netsh dhcp server 192.168.0.1 dump > C:\Dhcp\Dhcpcfg.dmp

Inside you will see commands like:

dhcp server \\10.1.1.1 scope 10.1.1.0 add reservedip 10.1.1.12 001D09FE6404 "printer-library" "" "BOTH"

By adding “netsh ” to the start of those lines, you have a pre formatted script to add DHCP configuration settings.

Congratulations! You’ve now set a reserved IP.

If you wanted to get creative, you could export your existing DHCP reservations, load the file into Microsoft Excel, modify the MAC addresses for the relevant devices and re-import it to your DHCP server. 30 seconds per printer by this method, or several minutes standing at the print queue.

Remember, this is just for printing, there is no reason you can’t use this for new servers, printers, switches, access points, specialized desktops and more.

For more netsh DHCP commands see Microsoft’s TechNet website:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc787375(WS.10).aspx

For more information in general about netsh commands see Microsoft’s Help and Support website: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/242468

Hope this post is useful. Best-practice printer management on a large sites not just about PaperCut. It’s also about your network management practices!

I recently helped out one of our biggest corporate customers to resolve issues with their print server. During the the last week of the financial year (when printing load is the highest) their print server became overloaded and stopped working. This sounds bad, but we quickly got things working smoothly again and learned that …

This customer had been running PaperCut for about 6 months without issue. Over this period they were gradually transitioning 100s of print queues from legacy print servers to the server hosting PaperCut. This single print server was hosting all queues for their offices country-wide. The extra load of these additional print queues combined with the end-of-year printing load pushed the server to the limit.

When analyzing the problem I noticed that this server was handling a huge print load. In the 30 day period prior the following printing occurred:

• 477,287 print jobs
• 2,021,454 pages printed
• Between 22,000 to 25,000 print jobs each week day

Wow! That’s a lot of printing!

They were also using hold/release queues and Find-Me printing (aka follow-me printing) to provide secure print release and to reduce paper wastage. The result was an average of around 500-600 print jobs waiting in the queue to be released.

The cause of the problem was under resourcing. Their setup was:

• A single server hosting the both the print queues and the PaperCut application server
• The server was a virtual machine assigned only a single processor
• Allocated 3GB of RAM
• Running on a 32-bit Windows Server operating system

My recommendation was to leave the print queues on the existing server, but move the PaperCut Application Server service to a server with 4GB of RAM, 2 or more processors, and running a 64-bit operating system with the 64-bit add-on pack. This configuration:

• Spreads the load between 2 servers
• Allows the PaperCut Application Server to take advantage of more memory (64-bit)
• More available processors allowed efficient processing of simultaneous print jobs

Since making these changes, their system has been running very smoothly. Their servers are now handling more load than ever, and without overloading the servers.

If you’re managing a large PaperCut installation, and in particular leveraging some of PaperCut’s advanced print management features such as secure print release, then there’s a few lessons to take from this:

• Don’t skimp on RAM or CPU resources
• Monitor your servers. Particularly if you’re adding print queues and increasing print load
• Consider running a 64-bit OS to allow for future expansion (e.g. more memory)
• Run PaperCut on an external database like SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL or MySQL

CC image courtesy of Emilian Robert Vicol on flickr

Priyanka transitions from Java code to Java drink!

The regular readers of our blog will have noticed a few off-topic posts slipping in from time to time. The common theme is coffee and beer. As a group of passionate computer programmers and tech geeks it’s no surprise that we have developed a strong corporate coffee culture. Coffee is our secret weapon! Over the past 10 years we’ve changed programming languages, compilers, and development practices, but one factor has remained constant: Coffee. It must be the pillar for PaperCut’s success.

Coffee is very much part of our culture. The company funds a continuous flow of lattes, cappuccinos and macchiatos (Hendrik’s favorite) all arriving from the coffee shop directly opposite the office. Most of us have espresso machines at home (e.g. Rancilio Silva) and discussions on brewing techniques seem to pop up in developer meeting agendas unannounced.

Recently management decided that attending a formal coffee barista course would be a good idea. Traditional businesses would have called this a “cooperate team building exercise”, however for us it’s “core competency training” The whole Melbourne development team (minus Tom) spent a day at a coffee training academy learning the finer points of coffee production.

Lessons included:

• The art of wasting lots of milk perfecting the perfect froth.
• The amount of coffee one must waste to calibrate the ideal 25 second espresso pour.
• Latte art: The art of convincing someone that the shape on the top of their coffee was deliberate.
• How to make beverages unknown to computer programmers (chai lattes, and hot chocolates)

The day finished off with a competition. We paired up into teams and had to make 8 coffee variants in 8 minutes. Congratulations to Matt and Jason who took out the title.

To take a slight deviation, my favorite pieces of coffee trivia:

• The magic number on Java .class files is 0xCAFEBABE
• The embedded framework we target for our HP embedded MFP development is called Chai

Overall it was a very fun day. We even got to walk away with a formal certificate – we’re now qualified Baristas! If we all get sick of writing print management software we now at least have a fall back option – open a Cafe!

Thanks to Jason for the great images!