Printing Controls for Many Users

1
Printing Controls for Many Users

• Presented by David Vernon
• SITACS

2
Whats being covered

• The qualities of a good print control solution.
• The technologies central to printing What you
  need to know.
• Printing at UOW The 97 Ricoh Aficio machines on
  campus.
• Printing at UOW SITACS printing controls and why
  they have evolved

3
The qualities of a good print control solution

• Should be based on widely supported standards
  rather than a tailor made tool.
• The most supported technologies on any computing
  platform are those that make their way in to
  operating systems. Building a print control
  system on operating system level services and
  packages which are standard across as many
  operating systems as possible will lead to a
  system that you can help grow as fast as the
  computing platform it is built on.

4
The qualities of a good print control solution

• Should be based on needs that have been
  thoroughly thought through and discussed with
  administrators and those with intimate knowledge
  of user printing requirements.
• Old habits die hard. Know what users habits are
  as well as what they want and need. A system that
  doesnt meet user requirements will not be used,
  and a system that cant cope with abuse as well
  as use will also be rejected.

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The qualities of a good print control solution

• Software and hardware should both be
  selected/designed with the print control system
  in mind.
• Dont let down an established standards based
  system by introducing components that rely on a
  different technology. All printers/servers/produce
  rs should be as similar as possible. Choose a
  print driver to develop for, and get it
  distributed among users.

6
The technologies central to printing What you
need to know

• Networking protocols TCP/IP and Appletalk are
  those most used on campus, TCP/IP should be
  favoured as the standard.
• The more you know about networking standards
  like DHCP, DNS and the place of routers and
  switches in networks the better.

7
The technologies central to printing What you
need to know

• Printing languages are the programming languages
  printers understand and use to create documents.
• Knowledge of Postscript, PCL and RPCS will let
  you manipulate documents based on their content.
  A smart print control system intercepts a
  document after it has been interpreted in to the
  printers chosen high level printer language,
  analyses the document and makes decisions before
  passing the document on to the printer.

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The technologies central to printing What you
need to know

• Knowledge of common operating system level
  printing software standards.
• By far the easiest printing software standard to
  integrate in to a print control system is lprng,
  compose of lpd (daemon) and lp (client). This is
  because lprng uses a simple text file database
  (printcap) to store printer configurations, and
  editing this file allows pre and post processing
  of a document even on the final machine in the
  printer spool chain.
• lprng is part of the great majority of linux
  distributions.

9
Printing at UOW The 97 Ricoh Aficio machines on
campus

• These are unique machines to design around
• They have multi-user capability.
• They have multi-function capability.
• Their native language is RPCS, although
  Postscript is entirely possible.
• The file system used for storage is unique.
• This capability is not yet fully supported.

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Printing at UOW The 97 Ricoh Aficio machines on
campus

• Currently UNIX/LINUX support for these machines
  is limited to printing to the machines IP
  address. Postscript 2 and text files have been
  tested successfully.
• However, the machines see themselves as four
  separate devices (copier, scanner, document
  server, printer) and all data sent to the
  machines IP address is printed to the printer
  device immediately.

11
Printing at UOW The 97 Ricoh Aficio machines on
campus

• Printing to the machines document server is
  required unless everyone using the machine gets
  along incredibly well and doesnt mind helping
  each other manage the machines use.
• So if the multi-user support built in to the
  Ricohs operating system doesnt meet your needs,
  you need a Windows box sitting next to the copier.

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Printing at UOW The 97 Ricoh Aficio machines on
campus

• This is favoured because these machines are held
  back from being a heavy duty machine in their own
  right.
• Document server storage cannot be increased above
  10GB until a firmware upgrade is released.
• The machine cant handle garbage input.
• Energy saving will always kick in after 4 hours.

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SITACS printing controls and why they have evolved

• A collection of HP 2100/2200 printers in teaching
  labs, each producing approx. 2000 pages a week
  during session.
• Document pre/post processing done via code
  talking to shell scripts and lprng on a Solaris
  system.
• The three printing languages supported are
  Postscript, Tex and Text.

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SITACS printing controls and why they have evolved

• The print control system was debiting users
  quotas inaccurately when counting Postscript
  pages using the traditional method Count the
  Page tokens.
• A Postscript page counter was written in house
  that evolved to support Tex and other less common
  input formats.

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SITACS printing controls and why they have evolved

• Users discovered they could use someone elses
  quota by plugging their Windows system into a lab
  network, and manipulating their user/machine
  identity to match that of another user.

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SITACS printing controls and why they have evolved

• So
• All printers are run from a dedicated private
  subnet accessible only through a UNIX printer
  router or through ports in machine rooms.
• Windows print queues exist only on Windows domain
  controllers. This queue is then shared to prevent
  clients from having a direct TCP connection.

17
Getting more information

• These slides are available at www.uow.edu.au/dve
  rnon/techpres.ppt
• There is also a report on my findings with the
  Ricoh machines, including a Ricoh contact list
  www.uow.edu.au/dvernon/Ricoh20Report.htm
• My email address dvernon_at_uow.edu.au