w w w. p r i n t a n d c o p y c o n t r o l .
c o m
Who am I?
• My Name is Juan De La Calle and I started working in iTS in 2006
• Originally my work by then it was to be in charge of the 2nd and 3rd level of Technical Support of our SW portfolio
• iTS started working with Papercut (as ASC*) in 2009 where I was directly involved as Technical Consultant
• During all this time I have witnessed how the solution has evolved until the product that it is now.
• I have helped a lot of resellers, dealers and manufacturers to gain confidence and trust in Papercut and, of course, in iTS
• I hope that I can continue this way, this time, with you!!
*ASC → Authorized Solution Center
What iTS can offer you? Our Portfolio
Willow – Automate workflows
Princity – Print Fleet Management
Umango
DocSlide
DocSlide
…and Papercut!!
Training Agenda
Today’s menu is:
• Cloud Directory Authentication
• Authentication based in Azure Active Directory
• Authentication based in Google Workspace/G-Suite
• High Availability
• Brief explanation about ways of High Availability and how does Papercut fits in
• Printer Deployment
• Introduction to the feature Print Deploy
• Site Servers
• Resilience and service-continuity in remote locations
• BYOD Printing
• Printing from portable devices
• PMITC
• What does this mean?
Cloud Directory Authentication
• Papercut is designed to use for authentication purposes every type of directory, this includes AD, LDAP,
eDirectory, OpenLDAP, etc…
• The crecent demand of cloud environments made Papercut to expand the authentication capabillities to cloud
based directory
• Azure
• The Azure authentication can use two different ways, Azure Active Directory or Azure Secure LDAP
• Differences are that AAD it uses MS Graph API (which is free!) and Azure Secure LDAP uses the standard
LDAP schema in Azure (this is chargable…)
• In this training we will speak about AAD
• Google Workspace/G-Suite
• Papercut can use Google as user’s source by enabling a LDAP client in the Google instance
• In order to secure the authentication a certificate is necessary to be created in Google’s console
and then uploaded to Papercut
Azure Active Directory
What’s needed to use Azure Active Directory for user’s authentication in Papercut?
• A Papercut installation with SSL certificate and reachable from the internet
• An Azure subscription
• Register an application inside of Azure for authentication
• Specify the redirect URL where the authentication token must be sent back to
• Create a secret associated to this authentication application
• Put all the details refered to tenant, application and secret in Papercut
• Enable MS SSO (optional)
• Test authentication
Google Workspace/G-Suite
What’s needed to use Google Workspace/G-Suite for user’s authentication in Papercut?
• Access to Google admin console (https://admin.google.com)
• Enable LDAP client
• From Google console create a certificate to encrypt and secure the communications from Papercut.
• Select in Papercut the authentication based on “Google Cloud Directory”
• Specify the domain name of the Google instance
• Upload the certificate created above
• Choose the groups where the users will be retrieved from
• Enable “Sign with Google” (optional)
• Test authentication
High Availability - Clustering
What is clustering?
• Clustering is basically having servers replicated to guarantee service’s continuity
• There is a constant communication between nodes to confirm which one is the Active one
• If a clustered Service is down then the cluster’s logic will use other’s node resource or
it will conmute to the other node making this one the new “Active”
What are the requirements for clustering? (Windows environment)
• 2 or more servers with Failover Clustering role installed and Hyper-V feature
• 2 permanent disk drives available for the cluster’s nodes (quorum + VM storage)
• 4 or more IP addresses assigned to:
• 1 IP address for each clustered node (mínimum 2 IP addresses)
• 1 IP address for the clustered system itself
• 1 IP address for the VM
How does it work?
• Every clustered node is a VM Host provider
• Papercut is installed in a VM that will be associated to one of the clustered nodes
• In case of fail of the node that currently hosts Papercut’s VM the other node will
be hosting the Papercut VM giving HA to the system.
Note that there is only one Papercut instance installed → One single server (we’ll discuss this later)
High Availability – HA Printing
What is HA Printing?
• HA Printing are ways to guarantee the printing service continuity by using redundancy or high availability in Print Servers
• There are many ways to achieve this but we will be focusing in Microsoft
What does Windows use for HA Printing configuration?
• A Hyper-V clustered system with a VM running a Print Server
• Enable the VM Monitoring in the cluster configuration
How does it work?
• In case of failure of the VM’s Spooler Service it will be restarted up to two times by the VM’s Service Control Manager
• If a third restart takes place then the VM Monitoring will understand that there is an issue and will take control
• VM Monitoring will restart the server and will be waiting for 15 minutes to see if another fail happens.
• In case of failing it will shutdown the node and will perform the failover action configured in the cluster (if any…)
Note that there is only one Papercut instance installed → One single server (we’ll discuss this later)
High Availability – Papercut App Server Failover
What is Papercut Failover?
• It is the way that Papercut has engineered to supply HA to Papercut sin v. 20.0
• In case of failure detected of Papercut in one server the system will be balanced to other Papercut server
What is needed for this feature?
• 2 o more Papercut servers
• Papercut DB externalized to a RDBMS system
• 1 Network Balancer 4 layer or greater with DSR enabled
• Configuration of this element is end customer’s task
• Permanent storage available for the system (SAN/iSCSI)
•
How does it work?
• The Network Load Balancer will inspect the status of the currently named “Active” node via the Health URL from Papercut
• If balancer receives a HTTP 200 status response from the Health URL then all good, no task to be done
• If balancer received a HTTP 500 status response from the Health URL then it will redirect traffic to the “Passive” node,
becoming now as the new “Active” one.
In this scenario are two or more Papercut servers involved so here is really a Service continuity!!!
High Availability – Print Server Network Balancing
What is Print Server Network Balancing?
• It is the usage of several Print Servers working together to supply HA via printing balancing
• Papercut has no specific component to supply for this technic
What is needed for this feature?
• 2 o more Print Servers (Papercut’s Secondary Print Server role)
• 1 Network Balancer
• Configuration of this element is end customer’s task
• Suggested think about Print Server’s affinity
How does it work?
• The Network Load Balancer will be exposing to the clients the shared resource instead of server’s.
• When a print job arrives to the balancer it will decide to what server will be printjobs send to
• This decission is based in the configured balancing algorightm (Round-Robin, fastest reachable server, etc…)
• In case of failure of one Print Servers, the other ones will be still available to attend the printint request.
In this scenario are two or more print servers involved so here is really a Service continuity!!!
High Availability – Design combining different HA ways
Papercut MF HA layers – App Server and Printing
Printer Deployment
What is Printer Deployment?
• As its name says it is the automated deployment of printers
• In big environments this is done by using GPOs, AD login script or other specific tools for deployment (e.g. Intune)
• Papercut has its own printer deployment tool called Print Deploy
What is needed?
• Advanced printer Management added to the standard Papercut license (one single zone included with basic license)
• Every client Computer must have installed the Print Deploy client tool
How does Print Deploy work?
• Create all the network zones necessary for the deployment
• Is necessary to use a Computer reference that will have installed the print queues to be remotely deployed
• In the reference Computer execute the clonner tool to clone the configuration and upload to Papercut
• An alternate way to the clonning way it can be the Mobility Print queues importing for other OS Support (e.g. Chromebooks)
• From Print Deploy’s section choose the desired print queues and deploy to the previously created zones
• Deployed queues can be set as optional installation, this will ask the end user if he/she wants to install the print queue.
A Benefit of Print Deploy is that solves the user’s itinerancy problem
• The user will have automatically installed the necessary print queues for that location
Site Servers
What is a Site Server?
• It is a Papercut module that allow the MFD authentication from a remote location in case of Communications failure.
• Without it the MFDs wouldn’t be usable (no authentication available) so nobody will be able to perform copying and scanning jobs
• It is NOT a HA system!
What functions will be available when a Site Server is present?
• Mostly all of the functions will be available (check table)
• Those that won’t are those specifics or set up at App Server
What is the expected behavior for the users?
• There can be defined what is called “Offline policies” that will
apply to the users during a network outage, this includes:
• Account selection
• Restricted credit
• Unathenticated users
• User Password Authentication
Site Servers - Troubleshooting
A site server is a robust element but this doesn’t make it out of having issues
A Site Server it uses “App-server-like” so in order to troubleshoot properly is necessary to diagnose accordingly
• A site server is composed of web server and data layer like an App Server
Site Server’s web interface not loading
• Check that is possible to access locally from the Site Server via ports (9191 / 9192)
• If is possible then issue could be due to the environment or FW rule recently applied
• Site server’s database is corrupted and needs a rebuild
• New SSL certificate installed at the App Server?
Site Server goes Offline very often
• This generally means that server has lack of Resources
• Other reason could be network issues
Site Server goes Offline intermittenly
• This is symptom of network’s latency although it could be due to lack of Resources
Contact time between App Server and Site Server can be increased
BYOD Printing – Mobility Print
Mobility Print is Papercut’s solution for portable devices using the printing system
Compatible devices are iOS, Android, Chromebooks, Windows and Mac
• Every OS has its own client/way of printing
The way of working is simple, the print queues are broadcasted using the more suitable way of broadcasting available
mDNS
• Simplest way of broadcasting –> Single network
DNS-SD
• Designed for more complex networks → Several IP zones requires the usage of a managed DNS server
• Possibility of subnet based restrictions
Known Host
• No broadcasting → Service listening for incoming requests
• Not possible subnet based restrictions
BYOD Printing – Mobility Print (Architecture I)
BYOD Printing – Mobility Print (Architecture II)
BYOD Printing – Mobility Cloud Print
What is Mobility Cloud Print?
• Mobility Cloud Print is a way of working that gives the ability to print to users from outside of the Print
Server’s network
• Limited to Windows, Mac and Chromebook.
How does it work?
• The way of reaching this is by generation of an invitation link to the use
• Link can have expiration dates for installing and for printers usage
• The user downloads and install a specific client that will connect to the Mobility Print server and will install
the printers available after authenticating the users
How does the printing take place?
• After installing the client and printers, the printing is possible because of the Papercut Cloud Services that
will act as intermediate between the Mobility Print Server and the client
• The communication between both parts is possible using WebRTC protocol
• Communications use STUN or TURN
PMITC – Introduction to Papercut HIVE
What is HIVE?
• HIVE is a new product from Papercut that is 100% cloud based
• It doesn’t requires any kind of server’s infrastructure as all is cloud managed
How does it work?
• The user receives an invitation link that allow them to install the client and printer directly and the mobile app
• As there is no link to a local directory, every user can be invited to use HIVE
• There are addons that allow Azure and Google Workspace users to be automatically provisioned
• The user installs directly a printer that natively is a “find-me printing” printer. No extra config needed.
• Every Computer installed becomes part of a mesh that composes the printing environment.
• Mesh is composed of Edge Nodes and Super Nodes (there must be at least 3 Super Nodes in the network)
How does the printing take place?
• Every time a user prints, the printjob is replicated to 3 other nodes in the mesh
• When the user goes to a MFD for releasing, HIVE instruct to the mesh where the held documents needs to be
printed from
• One of the nodes that host the held document will send the document to be printed via IPP to the printer
Doubts? Questions?
It has been a long day and we’ve seen a lot of interesting things!!!
Is there anything else you want to be repeated/clarified/deeply explained?
Useful links
• Cloud based authentication
• https://www.papercut.com/help/manuals/ng-mf/common/sys-user-group-sync-azure-standard-azure/
• https://www.papercut.com/help/manuals/ng-mf/common/sys-user-group-sync-gcd/
• HA and Network Load Balancing
• https://www.papercut.com/help/manuals/ng-mf/common/application-server-failover/
• https://www.papercut.com/kb/Main/NetworkLoadBalancing
• Printer Deployment
• https://www.papercut.com/help/manuals/print-deploy/set-up/add-zones-user-groups/
• https://www.papercut.com/help/manuals/print-deploy/set-up/set-up-print-deploy/in-a-print-server-environment/
• https://www.papercut.com/help/manuals/print-deploy/set-up/set-up-print-deploy/set-up-in-print-serverless-env/
• Site Servers
• https://www.papercut.com/help/manuals/ng-mf/common/site-server-offline-policies/
• https://www.papercut.com/kb/Main/TroubleshootingOfflineSiteServers/
• BYOD Printing
• https://www.papercut.com/help/manuals/mobility-print/how-it-works/architecture/
• https://www.papercut.com/help/manuals/mobility-print/setting-up-cloud-print-for-mobility-print/configure-cloud-print/
• Papercut HIVE
• https://www.papercut.com/help/manuals/pocket-hive/how-it-works/
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