PaperCut Blog / News

One of the usability issues that’s popped up with the Mac server testing is the process used add a printer. The Configure CUPS script handles the process of hooking in PaperCut to the CUPS print process. To view the printer in the interface however, you first need to perform a print job to “register the printer with the system”. This is a little counterintuitive.

We’ll make some changes in this area. As an interim solution, we’ll change the Configure CUPS script to it displays a reminder message. In the long term, we’ll make this script perform the configuration registration process automatically.

Thanks for the Mac users who recommended that we list our updates and version changes on the popular Mac site, www.versiontracker.com. PaperCut NG for Mac is now up on the site here.

We’d like to know if (or how many) Mac users use versiontracker to automate updates. Should we look at pushing PaperCut NG Mac updates this way? Please email us with your thoughts.

Rob at Sheridan College Institute of Technology & Advanced Learning has been kind enough to contribute a PaperCut Dashboard Widget. It’s a simple Widget that allows Apple users to conveniently check their print quota without the need to run the full client. Rob has hooked into PaperCut via the XML-RPC Web Services interface using some clever AppleScript calls.

The preferences on the back of the widget provide access to user-definable username and server name fields. The username defaults to the output of whoami. The server name defaults to papercut. As long as the server is aliased in your DNS as papercut, it should work out of the box with no configuration.

We’ll looking integrating the widget into the standard PaperCut NG release over the coming weeks. We’ll address the server discovery issue (default name) using the same method used in the standard client – that is, write the server’s name into an embedded configuration file during the initial install.

Thanks again to Rob for his contribution. Rob has access to the PaperCut source code and is using it as a basis for some other enhanced Mac client-side tools.

Download the Widget

Please feel free to email through feedback and I’ll pass it onto Rob.

As many of you may have seen from our home page, we have just release our first Apple Mac Server version of PaperCut NG. About 30 majority Mac sites (mostly in education) expressed an interest in the testing program prior to release, and we’ve had a lot more download and contribute since the public beta release.

A mistyped GCC compiler option caused problems with the 6.2.3472 build on PowerPC based systems. We quickly re-released on Saturday night with this issue addressed.

The feedback so far has been great. Also thanks for all the compliments. Some examples:

“I must say the product is exceptional. I have had no problems whatsoever. “

“The app is great, stable and all the functionality is there. The notifications are working well and the importing of users for OD was very fast. “

One tester suggested that we should update the install process so the “papercut” host user is created automatically upon install. We’ve reworking the postflight install script in the installer so it creates the user in the local NetInfo domain using the dscl tool.

One of the frustrating aspects of using dscl to create the user is that you need to explicitly define the user’s uid (unique ID). How do you determine a free UID on the Mac? I took a look at a few other scripts and program installers. The only examples I could find used hardcoded numbers! I suppose in the hope that they’re not already in use. I decided that the best way was to exec Perl and do a quick scan using getpwuid looking for a free slot. Here is the relevant section in the preflight script:

#
# Add the host user account if required
#
if ! `id ${UNIX_USERNAME} >/dev/null 2>/dev/null`; then
    echo "Creating account for ${UNIX_USERNAME}" >> $install_log
    #
    # Find first available UID between 101 and 499.
    #   We should probably try below 100 but I'd like to stay out of the Apple range
    #
    uid=`perl -e '
            my $t = 101;
            while ($t > $install_log
        echo "${msg}" 1>&2
        exit 1
    fi
    dscl . create /groups/${UNIX_USERNAME}
    dscl . create /groups/${UNIX_USERNAME} name ${UNIX_USERNAME}
    dscl . create /groups/${UNIX_USERNAME} passwd "*"
    dscl . create /groups/${UNIX_USERNAME} gid ${uid}

    dscl . create /users/${UNIX_USERNAME}
    dscl . create /users/${UNIX_USERNAME} RealName "${APP_NAME} Host User"
    dscl . create /users/${UNIX_USERNAME} UniqueID ${uid}
    dscl . create /users/${UNIX_USERNAME} shell /bin/bash
    dscl . create /users/${UNIX_USERNAME} NFSHomeDirectory "${dest}"
    dscl . create /users/${UNIX_USERNAME} PrimaryGroupID ${uid}

fi

The recommended practice, and the behaviour seen when creating users via System Preferences->Accounts, is for standard users to be created at UID 500 and above. 100 and below are reserved for Mac OS X system and process accounts. I’ve started our search for a UID between 101 and 499 and this should be a pretty safe bet.

We’d like to get some good testing done on this… for example, does it work OK with all systems linking into external user sources such as Open Directory? If you do experience any problems, please let us know. Also note that the code first checks to see if the user exists. This means that advanced administrators who would prefer to create their own papercut host user, can do so prior to the install.

The latest Mac build is 3481. Please keep the feedback coming!

Just a quick post to give a quick update on our Mac server development (print quota support for Mac OS X Server). We have PaperCut NG now running on Mac’s via the CUPS print system. I’m now working on the installer. With any luck we should have the system out to testers by the end of next week. If you’re not already on our testers list, and would like to participate, please send me a quick email via our support.

All those who keep up-to-date with our news page will see we’ve just released PaperCut NG for Linux. From my perspective this has been a very interesting project. After 6 years of working with PaperCut on Windows, it’s a refreshing change to work in a different environment. In my previous employment I worked almost exclusively on Unix so it nice keep a foot in this area.

Importantly, now that we have Linux support we offer a choice. Microsoft server licenses can be quite expensive. Now our users can save by run their print queues on a Linux system, or have the option to move to Linux at a later time without loosing any of PaperCut’s functionality or data.

To read more about PaperCut NG on Linux, see the PaperCut NG area of the website.

Wow! It’s only taken 18 months but it seems like a lifetime! We’ve just uploaded the production ready release of PaperCut NG 6.0. We still have a long list of TODO/Wishlist items and will now start working on these for the 6.1 release. PaperCut Quota users can also expect a 5.3 release with some new features.

As always, a BIG thanks to all the people that helped with the testing. I know a number of the network admins testing PaperCut NG took a few risks deploying the Beta on some very large production networks! Fortunately any show-stopper bugs we tracked down quickly and fixes issued in a few hours. The real-life stress testing help out great so thanks again to all the testers.

For those people new to PaperCut and interested in what we’ve been doing with PaperCut NG, I recommend taking a look at the product tour. These also include some cool animated demos. I’ll sure you’ll see more of these types of demos in the future as there a fantastic way to document some of the more “complicated” processes.

Please keep an eye on this web log over the next few weeks as I’ll be give my spin on my favourite new features in PaperCut NG.

It’s been a while since my last entry. Now that our PaperCut NG application is out from under wraps I can start writing a little bit more out this work. PaperCut NG is a substantial development at PaperCut Software and has been the focus of our efforts for over 12-months. PaperCut NG is packed full of new features, however I believe the most important change is the bits you can’t seen – that is the new application internals. PaperCut NG now incorporates a framework and design utilizing the latest technologies and software development methodologies. These include:

• Service Oriented Architecture
• Utilization of XML web services
• Layered design to facilitate strong security, reliability and scalability

The new framework will allow us to:

• Add new features faster
• Support all major operating systems including Windows, Mac, Linux and Unix
• Scale to the largest of sites.

The objective for the PaperCut NG 6.0 release was to match the PaperCut Quota feature and enhance in the areas of:

• Web based administration
• Shared accounts
• Support for Mac and Linux workstations

We’ve achieved all this and our very close to final release. We expect to have PaperCut NG 6.0 final out in the first week of October. If you’re itching to try it out now, consider signing up for our beta test program.

Over the next few weeks I’ll write up some more web log entries covering some of the new features and design decisions.

Pierre, one of our PaperCut users from France, has been working with us to track down a few bugs in our page count detection associated with Canon PCL drivers. Unfortunately the Canon IR series printers extend the standard PCL print language and driver output by adding custom binary header and extra data spread throughout the stream. We have worked around this by filtering the binary extensions but changes in recent drivers have caused bugs to surface. This has now been fixed in the latest PCM update. It’s very frustrating when manufactures “extend” published standard with undocumented proprietary extensions!

Pierre also has emailed through an example of a method he uses to control the addition of printers on his network’s computers. I have added Pierre’s example to our knowledge base.

We’re just uploading the final 5.2 build of both PaperCut Quota and PaperCut ChargeBack now. It’s been out in “preview release” format for a month, and with the help of a number of customers, we have tracked down and squashed any remaining bugs. Most of the report bugs were minor – an alignment issue here, a spelling mistake there. There was however one “killer bug” that slipped through our internal testing. It turned out that if a user selected a particular set of page dimension settings in Microsoft Word, the PaperCut system service would enter an infinite loop consuming 100% CPU. It showed up on some of the large test sites after a few hundred print jobs or so. Anyway, all will be happy to know we have fixed this bug in the official 5.2 release!

Once again, thanks to all who assisted with testing, “bug squashing”, and of course all the customers that contributed their thoughts on what features we should include.

Next week, I’ll write something about how to deploy the User Inquiry Tool using a “zero-install” methods.