Articles by Categories

Technical - General

• Printing from Unix to Windows (Part 2)
• Printing from Unix to Windows (Part 1)
• LPR/LPD Printing
• Remote Session Startup Programs
• How To Test FTP Printers?
• What are FTP Printers?
• Startup Programs
• How to find out machine name and IP address?

Technical - UniPrint

• Why now you don’t need to reboot after installing UniPrint Server 7?
• Bug Report: UniPrint 7
• Bug Report: Email Printout in UniPrint (Update)
• Bug Report: Email Printout in UniPrint
• How to Use the Email Feature in UniPrint?
• Bug Report: UniPrint Server 6.1.5
• Bug Report: UniPrint Host Edition 6.1.4
• How to Set Up FTP Printer with UniPrint Spool Server?
• Why do you need to reboot after installing UniPrint Server?

UniPrint Products

• UniPrint Version 7 Licensing
• What’s New in UniPrint Version 7?
• UniPrint License and Banner
• UniPrint Host Edition licensing
• UniPrint VDI Edition licensing
• SbC products licensing
• UniPrint license
• UniPrint products overview

UniPrint Business

• UniPrint and .Net
• UniPrint's New Website
• UniPrint Plagiarizes? Copycat?
• Search Engines Take Note: Do Not Search UniPrint
• A Brief History of UniPrint

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What’s New in UniPrint Version 7?

Despite UniPrint’s website said that UniPrint Version 7 would be available in January 2010 (and in early February changed to “contact UniPrint”), UniPrint version 7 finally came out in early March 2010. What’s new with this two-month overdue product?

Taken out from the first chapter of the admin guide, the new features of UniPrint version 7 are:

Redesigned UniPrint Management Console:
The UniPrint Management Console has been redesigned to improve efficiency and usability, making it more intuitive to use and configure UniPrint components on remote servers as well as the local server can also be managed from any server. Debugging options have been moved to the Components screen, under Properties & Settings.

Improved Licensing Scheme:
UniPrint is still licensed per application server. However, applying a different license file on each individual application server is no longer required. UniPrint now utilizes a license server component that is installed on one of the UniPrint Spool Servers and the license file is applied to this designated license server. Network administrators also have the ability to monitor and track license usage in real time.

The following features are in the UniPrint Gateway Edition only.

Support for Thin Client USB Printers:
Extending the support for thin-client devices running WindowsXPe/ Embedded Standard, UniPrint now also supports USB printers attached to thin-client devices running Windows CE/Embedded CE.

Improved Printer Properties Support:
For printer properties like paper tray, forms and resolution, the actual printer property value is now imported from the native printer driver.

Support for Secure Printing:
UniPrint now supports HP printers with secure printing capability where print jobs are not printed until users enter their PIN codes at the physical printer. Currently, the following printer drivers are supported: HP Universal Printing PCL 5, HP Universal Printing PCL 5 (v 5.0), HP Universal Printing PCL 6, HP Universal Printing PCL 6 (v 5.0), HP Universal Printing PS and HP Universal Printing PS (v 5.0).

Support for Advanced Printer Functions:
Network administrators can now create unique printer profiles with different combinations of advanced printer functionalities (such as stapling, hole punching, binding, etc.) enabled according to users’ specific printer requirements.

New Functionalities to Further Reduce Bandwidth Consumption:
Two new functionalities have been added to further reduce print job size, improve overall printing speed and reduce bandwidth consumption.

Font Replication - Once a day at a prescheduled time UniPrint queries all terminal servers for newly installed fonts and replicates them to all print servers. This feature creates a smaller print job and improves the overall printing speed and print job quality.

Font Caching – When full font embedding is selected, UniPrint strips the font objects from the compressed PDF print job before sending it to the Print Server. At the Print Server, UniPrint then rebuilds the font objects before printing. This reduces the print job size for subsequent print jobs with the same font objects.

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UniPrint's New Website

UniPrint’s old website had been decommissioned in early December last year, replaced by the new website with a completely new look. Below are the screenshots of the old and the new websites of UniPrint.

Old UniPrint Website

 

New UniPrint Website

 

After playing with the new website, it basically works the same way as the old one, without much functionality added. Actually, the forum was taken offline, which is a big no-no.

The old old forum should be made available because it provides a good medium for UniPrint users to exchange ideas and share experience on using UniPrint products. We guess this website will have to take up more of the forum functionality of sharing ideas and experiences among the UniPrint community.

Also of interest in this new website is its big banner announcing that Version 7 will be available in January 2010. It is just about two more weeks from today to the end of January. So Version 7 should be out any day now. Stay tuned. We’ll be testing version 7 when it’s available.

Our internal helpers hinted that the new website had been under construction for more than two years. Hmm… , that’s interesting.

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UniPrint Plagiarizes? Copycat?

While doing research on the internet, we stumbled upon this article by Brian Madden (dated April 14, 2004). Though outdated but it still is interesting.

UniPrint and ThinPrint are head-on competitors: they offer products in a narrow market space. Apparently back then in 2004, a webpage on UniPrint reveals this text:

As a Citrix Premium Business Alliance Partner, ThinPrint offers software solutions for ideal print support under Citrix MetaFrame 1.8 and Citrix MetaFrame XP.

Obviously UniPrint plagiarizes from ThinPrint. Can UniPrint do better than being a copycat?

Hope that their software does not come from plagiarism. Otherwise, UniPrint users may be in for big trouble.

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Bug Report: Email Printout in UniPrint (Update)

We posted a bug report about sending out printout from UniPrint using its emailing feature previously.

Of course, we do not have the source code – we have not even seen any UniPrint source code for that matter – so we won’t be able to know for sure if that’s the problem.

We spoke to our internal developers. They suspected that the EnableSsl property of the smtp client instance has not been set to true. If it is, our internal developers said the bug should be an easy one to fix. You just need to add one line of code.

Hope that the UniPrint developers take note of this.

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Bug Report: Email Printout in UniPrint

Scenario:
Our previous article (How to use the email feature in UniPrint?) shows you how to set up and use the nice feature in UniPrint that lets you email your printout to someone directly when you print to the Uniprint printer. The setup was based on not checking the Server requires authentication checkbox.

 

However, because of security reasons, email servers nowadays seldom forfeits authentication prior to sending an email. So check the Server requires authentication checkbox now, and a window pops up, asking for credentials. Fill in the user, password, and confirm the password, then click OK. If you need to change the credentials later, just click the Set credentials button.

 

Now log on to the UniPrint Server via a remote session (Microsoft’s Terminal Services RDP connection, or Citrix’s ICA connection. Open up a document (or type something in Notepad), and click print. When the printer dialogue shows up, select the Uniprint printer (if you have more than one printer installed), and click the preferences button. The Uniprint driver dialogue box show up.

 

Click the Email tab. Fill in all the fields, or at least the TO: field, and click OK to close the UniPrint Driver dialog box. Next click Print on the Printer dialog box. Then you’ll get this error message box: UniPrint was unable to send your document to the desired recipients.

 

Versions Affected:
This bug has been confirmed to occur in UniPrint Server 6.1.5, and is expected to occur in all previous versions of 6.x.

Workarounds:
None at this time.

Updates:
None at this time.

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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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What are FTP Printers?

What is FTP?

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, which is one of the standard protocols used on the internet. FTP is specifically for transferring files from one machine to another over the internet originally, now via any network.

Some printer vendors (like HP and Lexmark) manufacture FTP printers. These printers have a little built-in FTP engine that accepts PDF (Portable Document Format) file as print jobs and prints them.

The printers will also have a built-in pdf engine to render print jobs to actual physical paper output. Thus individual computers do not need to have the printer driver for that particular model installed in order to print properly.

Based on a similar principle, UniPrint’s universal printer driver basically converts (through some third-party PDF engine) the output of a document’s printing function to a pdf file and sends it to the printer for rendering. The 3rd-party pdf engine UniPrint driver uses is Amyuni (for all versions of Uniprint's core products) and Foxit (for the newer versions of UniPrint's core products).

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? Read on.

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