UniPrint Version 7 Licensing

As UniPrint users know, printing through UniPrint without a valid license will have a UniPrint banner printed diagonally across all printed pages. (Read more about UniPrint license and banner here.)

UniPrint version 7 came out with a different architecture in terms of its licensing scheme. In previous versions, the license is installed on the UniPrint Server (now called the Application Server), and was tied to that server by the server’s hostname and ip address.

Let’s say you have two UniPrint Servers, each having a valid license. In version 6, this means that you will have two license files: one file ties to server A with server A’s machine name and ip address, the other file ties to server B with server B’s machine name and ip address. You can only use the first file on server A only, not on server B, and likewise with the second file.

With version 7, licensing has been moved from individual Application Server (or UniPrint Server in old terminology) to a centralized License Server. This License Server resides with the Spool Server, so in order for you to install the License Server, you’ll have to also install the Spool Server. Fortunately, both come in the same installation (.msi) package.

With this new licensing scheme, licenses for all previous will not work with version 7. That means existing users will have to upgrade their older licenses to get a new corresponding version 7 license. Users are strongly cautioned to test out version 7 prior to deploying UniPrint into production.

In the scenario above, if you decide to have the two version 6 licenses installed on the same License Server in version 7, you will have to upgrade your licenses. Upgrade can be done through UniPrint's website. After the upgrade, you should receive in email a new version 7 license in one single file that contains information of your two previous version 6 licenses.

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Printing from Unix to Windows (Part 1)

Last time we talked about LPR/LPD Printing. This time, we’ll see how to put it into practical use.

Let's say you have a Unix machine and an XP machine, and you have an HP printer locally attached to your XP machine. You want to print a file on your Unix machine, but you don’t want to disconnect your HP printer from your XP machine and connect it to your Unix machine just to print that file, and then reconnect the printer back to your XP machine. Is there a better way of doing this?

Yes, this is how:

First, you need to add certain windows component on your XP machine to make this happen: On your XP machine, click Start -> Control Panel -> Add or Remove Program, then click "Add/Remove Windows Components" on the left pane.

Scroll down to “Other Network File and Print Services”, click the Details button.

Select “Print Services for Unix”, then click OK.

Click “Next”, and it will start installing this component. Depending on what other components you have installed on your system, it may ask you for the Windows CD.

Next, click Start -> All Programs -> Administrative Tools -> Services. Scroll down and you should see the “TCP/IP Print Server”. This is the new service installed. It is started., and the start mode is manual.

You may want to change this service to start automatically every time you start your system. To do so, highlight “TCP/IP Print Server” and right-click, and select Properties from the context menu. Change the startup type to Automatic, and click OK.

Now you have the lpd (line printer daemon) running. Next is to set up a print queue.

Click Start -> Printer and Faxes. Let’s say you have a printer called “HP LaserJet 4000” locally attached to your XP machine. Remove the spaces in the printer name by renaming it to “HPLaserJet4000” because Unix doesn’t like printer names with spaces.

That's it! The last thing you need to know is the machine name or the ip address of your machine. If you don’t know the info, read this article to find out how. Fill in the name of the printer or print queue on that server.

Let's say if your machine's ip address is 192.168.1.123.

Next, you have to define your HPLaserJet4000 printer on your Unix machine. Once done, you can start printing from Unix using the lpr command. The syntax varies with different flavors of Unix/Linux. The command may look something like this:
lpr -PHPLaserJet4000 myfile.txt

You can even do the test using another windows machine. On another windows machine, open up a command window (Start -> Run, then type cmd). In the command window, type:
lpr –S 192.168.1.123 –P HPLaserJet4000 myfile.txt

If it complains that "Host 192.168.1.123 is unknown", try pinging your XP machine. If it fails to ping your XP machine, most likely it's the firewall settings on your XP machine that's preventing this. Start -> Control Panel -> Windows Firewall. You probably will have to adjust your firewall settings.

It’s worth noting that this works not just for any locally attached printer (via the LPT1: port, or a USB port), it also works for any printer accessible from your XP machine, be it a TCP/IP printer, or a printer attached to a print server.

That means, you have this set up in an office environment so that printouts from any application running on a non-Windows system (such as Unix/Linux systems or any legacy systems) can be re-directed to and printed on a Windows system – as long as the non-Windows system has the lpr capability.

Part 2

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How to Set Up FTP Printer with UniPrint Gateway?

When you have an FTP printer (read “What are FTP Printers?”), you first need to test it to make sure that all hardware and network connections work. (Read “How to Test FTP Printers?”) UniPrint literature states that when you have an FTP printer, you don’t need to install the UniPrint Print Server component; you just need to install the UniPrint Spool Server component.

After you install UniPrint Spool Server, start the management console. We are using the latest version (version 6.1.5) for our demonstration.

UniPrint Spool Server Management Console

On the management console, click the New Printer button. It will only create FTP printers. Give it a name, like, “Lexmark FTP” since we are using a Lexmark T630 printer after our little experiment on testing FTP printers.

Give a name to the new FTP printer

Then, a window titled “New Printer Properties” pops up. The only important information at this point is in the “FTP Settings” tab. Fill in the IP address of our Lexmark printer (192.168.1.10), and the User ID, which is “anonymous” for our Lexmark printer. And we know that from our little experiment, this account doe not require a password, so we’ll leave the “Password” and “Confirm Password” fields blank. If you printer model requires a password, then fill in these two fields accordingly.

Create an FTP Printer in UniPrint Spool Server

Click OK, and, voila, you’ll see our newly created FTP printer shows up in the management console.

FTP printer created

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How to Test FTP Printers?

We talked about what FTP printers are. But how do you know that a printer is an FTP printer? Or a better question, how do you know that an FTP printer is actually working?

Essentially, the question is: How to test FTP printers? The following steps show you how:

Let’s assume:

1. we have a Lexmark printer model T630, which is supposed to be an FTP printer;
2. we are running Windows (any newer version of Windows) on our PC, and
3. the Lexmark T630 printer is connected to our Windows PC not via a direct cable, but via a network path.

Let’s further assume that the machine name for this Lexmark T630 is LEX630, and its ip address is 192.168.1.10. We need either piece of information to print to it.

1. Open a command Windows. (To do this: Click Start button -> Run, and type in cmd in the open box, and click OK.)

2. Next, we need to reassure ourselves that our PC can actually “talk” to the printer. We use the ping command.

   In the command window, type
     ping LEX630
   

   If it comes back to say something like
     Ping request could not find host LEX630
   it means that perhaps our name server is not set up properly, but let’s not worry about it now.

   Instead, we turn to the printer’s ip address, which we try to ping:
     ping 192.168.1.10
   

   If it comes back with:
     Pinging 192.168.1.10 with 32 bytes of data:
     Reply from 192.168.1.10: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=254
   that means success; our PC and “talk” to the printer directly. But if it comes back with:
     Pinging 192.168.1.10 with 32 bytes of data:
     Request timed out.
     Request timed out.
   that means problems, usually hardware and/or network problems. Troubleshooting it is beyond the scope of this article. We just assume that we are successful in establishing connection between our PC and the printer, and we move on with our experiment.

3. Next, let’s further assume that we have a valid pdf file called test.pdf in our temp folder. Still inside the command window, type:
     cd %temp%
   

   The %temp% is a variable that represents the actual path to our temp folder. Windows will translate the variable %temp% and set our default folder to our temp folder. And we can do the test to make sure that test.pdf is actually here. Type:
     dir test.pdf

4. Now it’s the exciting part: We are actually going to ftp into the printer. Still in the same command window, type:   >ftp 192.168.1.10
   

   It comes back with:
     Connected to 192.168.1.10
     220 Lexmark T630 FTP Server 55.0.39 ready.
     User:
   

   Please note that the exact wording may vary on different implementations of the FTP server by different vendors.

5. Here it’s asking for a user account. FTP printers should have an anonymous account, so type “anonymous”. This account usually does not require a password. We should see something like this:
     230 User anonymous logged in.
   

   Some implementations do require a password, a common password to use is “guest”. If not, the password is usually given in the response after we typed in “anonymous” like:
     Use welcome as password.

   If we see the prompt becomes
     ftp>
   that means we have successfully logged in to the FTP server (or the printer in our case).

6. Here comes the meat: we are to transfer test.pdf file directly to the printer. In the ftp prompt, type:
     ftp> put test.pdf
   

   We should see responses like:
     200 PORT command successful.
     150 Opening ASCII data connection.
     226 Transfer complete. 9375 bytes sent.
   

   The printer then prints out our pdf file.

7. To exit the ftp program, type “bye” at the ftp prompt.

And this concludes our little experiment on testing FTP printers.

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UniPrint Host Edition licensing

UniPrint Host Edition enables user to print from host systems (such as Sun’s Solaris, IBM’s AS/400, Linux, etc.) to their Windows desktop machines.

UniPrint Host Edition uses a totally different licensing model from the core UniPrint SbC products or UniPrint VDI Edition. UNiPrint Host Edition uses per usage licensing, and the usage in the Host Edtition is number of pages printed.

You will need the following information to generate a UniPrint Host Edition license file:

• The machine name on which UniPrint Host Server is be installed. (You need to install the Host Edition first prior to requesting a Host Edition license.)
• The IP address of the machine above.
• A serial number that you obtained from your supplier (a reseller, a distributor, or the vendor).
• Install Code: This information is available only after you installed the software. So, you need to install the software first, and record the install code from the UniPrint management console.
• The number of pages you are licensed to print.

As of writing, the initial value for the number of pages in a Host Edition license is 60,000 pages, and you can order additional bundles in increments of 10,000 pages.

All these values will be reset at the beginning of the calendar year. For example, let’s say you have a 60,000-page license and you used up 56,000 pages by December 31 of the year. Comes January 1 of next year, and you’ll get your full 60,000 pages back for the entire year. However, you cannot carry the remaining 4,000 pages into next year so that you can have 64,000 pages in your reserve.

You can set it up in the Host Edition management console so that you’ll receive notifications through emails when you approach within a certain percentages (e.g., 10%, 5%) of the limit of your license.

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UniPrint VDI Edition licensing

UniPrint VDI Edition is to be installed on a desktop running Microsoft desktop Windows, i.e., XP or Vista.

The licensing model of UniPrint VDI Edition is different from the UniPrint SbC products. The VDI Edition uses a per-server and per-concurrent-users model.

You will need a machine to act as a UniPrint License Server, which is usually a UniPrint Spool Server.

Unlike the licensing of core UniPrint SbC products, you don’t need the following information:

• Environment: RDP only or ICA (ICA license includes RDP, so RDP can run on ICA license).
• Platform: 32-bit support or 64-bit support (64-bit license includes 32-bit support, so 32-bit platform can run on 64-bit license).

You will need the following information to generate a license file:

• The machine name on which UniPrint Spool Server is/will be installed.
• The IP address of the machine above.
• A serial number that you obtained from your supplier (a reseller, a distributor, or the vendor).
• The number of servers.
• The number of concurrent users.

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How to find out machine name and IP address?

As you need the machine name and IP address in order to request a valid license, you need to know how to find out the information. There are several ways to find out the name and the IP address of your machine.

The easiest way is from a command window. To open a command window, click Start -> Run, then in the Open box, type cmd, and click OK. In the command window, type hostname to see the name of your machine, and type ipconfig to see the IP address of your machine.

Click here to see a larger image.

You can also find out the machine name by right-clicking My Computer (on the desktop or on the Start menu), and then choose Properties, then click on the Computer Name tab.

Click here to see a larger image.

If you cannot see My Computer on your desktop, right-click on the blank area of the desktop, click Properties, then click the Desktop tab, then click the Customize Desktop button. Click OK to exit.

If you cannot see My Computer on your Start menu, right-click the Start button, click Properties, click the Start Menu tab, click the Customize button. Another dialog window shows. On this window, click the Advanced tab. In the middle part about Start menu items, scroll down to find My Computer, then choose either Display as a link, or Display as a menu. Click OK to exit.

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