DalekSec Posted January 19, 2017 Posted January 19, 2017 Just came across this article : Project Banksia – PaperCut Blog / News If this works like they say it does it would be a god send!
DalekSec Posted January 19, 2017 Author Posted January 19, 2017 One question i can't find the answer for is, how do they charge the person for the printing? must have to log in at some point!
newpersn Posted January 19, 2017 Posted January 19, 2017 One question i can't find the answer for is, how do they charge the person for the printing? must have to log in at some point! Guessing they would need to enter there school/work username and password. Keep it secure i guess.. We use Webprint here and it works well for the trainee staff who want to keep using there personal laptop.
DalekSec Posted January 19, 2017 Author Posted January 19, 2017 We have web print at the moment, but always seemed a bit flaky and not that straight forward for people wanting to print. e.g they need to log onto the VLE to get the link to get to the web print etc. Hopefully this will be easier!
DalekSec Posted January 19, 2017 Author Posted January 19, 2017 Found the app on Android, one of the screenshots is a login page, so that answers that question! 1
googlemad Posted January 19, 2017 Posted January 19, 2017 We just set up the email to print queues so users can send their documents through to the pull queue and pick them up within 3 days, seems to work well enough although they have to come from the email address linked with the user account in PaperCut to work rather than their personal email address IIRC. Doesn't really get used that much to be honest! The thing is these days if I have something on my iPhone / iPad I don't really need to be wasting paper when I can just refer to it on my device!
DalekSec Posted January 19, 2017 Author Posted January 19, 2017 It's not so much printing from iPhones etc, we are a boarding school so all the students have their own Laptops (mainly macs unfortunately) and often ask how they print from them. We show them the web print way but they don't remember it for very long!
timbo343 Posted January 19, 2017 Posted January 19, 2017 We have BYOD printing working ish at our place. When the login to the wireless they are presented with a welcome screen (landing page). From here they are able to login to the web interface of papercut and submit jobs to the virtual BYOD printers which link to the MFD copiers.
Paid_Peanuts Posted January 19, 2017 Posted January 19, 2017 We have BYOD printing working ish at our place. When the login to the wireless they are presented with a welcome screen (landing page). From here they are able to login to the web interface of papercut and submit jobs to the virtual BYOD printers which link to the MFD copiers. Out of interest which wifi vendor do you use?
timbo343 Posted January 19, 2017 Posted January 19, 2017 Out of interest which wifi vendor do you use? Ruckus
Paid_Peanuts Posted January 19, 2017 Posted January 19, 2017 Ruckus Ah ok same here, take it you use the captive portal for your BYOD network? So have you simply edited the HTML captive portal page to include a hyperlink to PaperCut web print? Is this the page after they have signed in?
timbo343 Posted January 19, 2017 Posted January 19, 2017 Ah ok same here, take it you use the captive portal for your BYOD network? So have you simply edited the HTML captive portal page to include a hyperlink to PaperCut web print? Is this the page after they have signed in? Not quite. Ita not great the way ive got it to work but it works. The Staff and Student SSIDs are guest hotspots so when a user jumps on them they are presented wwith a custom page which askes them to download the MITM cert or continue logging in. Then they are presented with a custom form that has a username and password box, these are then sent to the ZD when the user clicks login. The code for this was given to me by Ruckus. Once the user has authenticated, they are presented with a landing page hosted on an internal webserver. From here they can get to Papercut, google, MITM cert, O365 etc. Our smoothwall does Radius Auth Accounting and the ZD doeas AD auth. To be fair it works great, but took a lot of testing. I would like to use Radius and Smoothwall for 802.1x authenication but the ZD and smoothwall dont talk. I want to specify groups in AD on who can use which SSID. If i choose Radius the ZD and smoothwall only know about the Default role on the ZD rather than custom roles.
jahayes91 Posted January 19, 2017 Posted January 19, 2017 We setup the PaperCut project banksia today and initially it seems pretty promising! Certainly begs the question whether a Mac server is required to facilitate iOS and MacOS printing! My main question at the moment is whether they plan to support charging printing to a shared account because unless users are set to have all their printing automatically charged to their personal account, the print jobs aren't released to the copier print queues. Of course this only applies if you are only advertising PaperCut print queues that are held for release at the copiers. Certainly wouldn't be a problem for the HP printers in our boarding houses! I've emailed PaperCut support to find out whether I'm missing a trick or if it is something that is on their roadmap. I'll keep you posted!
Mel_PaperCut Posted January 20, 2017 Posted January 20, 2017 Hi it’s Mel here, I’m one of the techs here at PaperCut, and part of the Project Banksia team (and funny enough, I missed the photo!). It’s my first time posting over here, really excited to hear the feedback so far! @newpersn - The user authentication is performed by the Operating System, usually a directory service like Active Directory or LDAP. In our development pipeline, we have “per job authentication” being worked on and soon available through the auto-update mechanism. This means every time you submit a print job, you’re required to authenticate. This will be great for shared iPads - e.g. multiple students using the same iPad. @DalekSec - With Project Banksia we want to make it easy for users with any type of self-managed device to access printing services without the need of IT - i.e. make the Admins job easier - I was previously an admin in a past life. I know that feeling! Managing printing has got harder because you’ve got less control as there are more and more devices outside your control (darn BYOD!). No need to muck around with vendor specific drivers, or vendor custom apps that only work with printer brand X. It will also have free unicorns too. @Jahayes91 - I saw your email query come through to our team :-) To highlight here for all, currently with Banksia, you’ll need to set up on a Windows Print Server. However be aware that we have a Mac version in the works - actually most of the dev team working on Project Banksia use mac! For existing sites who have configured a Mac Server to do iOS printing, your existing solution still remains. Banksia is aimed at solving the printing problem for BYOD devices. If you have a Windows Print Server, Banksia is for you! If you only run a Mac server, you’ll have to be a little more patient :-) Mac clients/laptops are however fully supported now! You raise a very good point about shared accounts. They are very important for staff in Schools, and we’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this too. For shared account selection at the moment, once we integrate this with PaperCut NG/MF, you can use the PaperCut web app (a web clip) for iOS devices, see the link below: https://www.papercut.com/products/ng/manual/applicationserver/topics/mobile-mac-iosprinting.html There are hacky workarounds to avoid using the PaperCut web app. You can setup a specific print queue and use printer-level override so when a user prints to that queue, it will default to a particular shared account. This wouldn’t be the best as you’d only want to advertise this print queue to certain users. An alternative could be with a print script as well. We understand these aren’t the best solutions for shared account selection, we are revising the workflow across all supported devices. Keep a lookout for this in the future! For Android mobile printing, and Chrome OS printing, we can build the shared account mechanism into the app itself that you download from the Google Play Store. However for iOS it’s a little bit more difficult and we are looking into this now. One idea is that we can use notifications and a native app. Thanks all for the posts. We’re trying to do development a little differently in this project. That’s why we’ve made it public now via our “percolator” - all good things start with coffee. Our goal is to do the development in a more open and public environment. We’re keen to get this early feedback. Please keep it coming! Feel free to post any further questions. I’ll keep an eye on this thread, or you can also jump into the comments on the project page here: https://www.papercut.com/products/percolator/project-banksia-byod-mobile-printing/ If your questions are too hard for a “sys admin”, I’ll escalate to the development team! 1
mrbios Posted January 20, 2017 Posted January 20, 2017 @Mel_PaperCut any issues with domains ending in .local? (I see it says it's using mDNS which if i remember correctly, doesn't play nice with .local domains) or are there workarounds?
Mel_PaperCut Posted January 23, 2017 Posted January 23, 2017 @mrbios - Great question about .local domains! Are you running into any issues, or just noticed this? Either way I'll chase up with the devs to see if they know of any issues. I'll let you know shortly.
Mel_PaperCut Posted January 25, 2017 Posted January 25, 2017 @mrbios Good news! I have confirmation from our developers that we can see the print queues with a .local domain and mDNS. Let me know if you come across any issues! 2
TechMonkey Posted April 12, 2017 Posted April 12, 2017 Has anyone got this working yet across subnets? I'm using the DNS option and on my PC it shows as DNS verified and all green, on the Printer server it shows as failed but all the steps are green and on my mobile I think it shows all green (some of the options fall off the screen and it doesn't scroll). I've run through all the NSLOOKUP steps in troubleshooting and they all work. Fire up the client on Android and I get nothing. Any hints would be greatly appreciated.
TechMonkey Posted April 12, 2017 Posted April 12, 2017 For future generations, it does work, tried on another device and it worked. Looks like it may have been some rogue DHCP scope settings on a second server.
Tinh_PaperCut Posted April 20, 2017 Posted April 20, 2017 Hi TechMonkey, My name is Tinh and I am one of the developers on Mobility Print team. If you setup Mobility Print with a subzone (for example pc-printer-discovery.), ensure that the is included in the list of DNS search domains on your Android device. This is usually returned from your DHCP server. I am a little confused with your last sentence "Looks like it may have been some rogue DHCP scope settings on a second server." Did you mean that you have multiple Mobility Print server installations? If you have any problems, please contact our support team at [email protected]
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now