The adoption of tablets is a fact nowadays, so the system administrators must provide some mechanism in order to allow tablet users to print. If we focus on iPad type of tablets, these are able to print via AirPrint, but just using a small set of selected printers.
Any already established company has an infrastructure of computers and printers. Adding a new kind of printers does mean buying new hardware and this is not an option in many sites. On the other side, in large corporate sites (so, do not think on a small office with just a few computers) the network is organized and divided, and wireless users do use different network ranges or VLANs than wired users. AirPrint does not work across subnets.
So, the challenge involves two main tasks:
1.- Allow existing printers to be compatible with the AirPrint mechanism.
2.- Allow the usage of wired printers from wireless devices even if they are in different networks, so traveling across different subnets.
Both topics have been already covered in other blogs, but so far, I haven't found a tutorial indicating all the necessary tasks.
Our scenary:
A middle size network with a few hundreds of wired computers. These computers are organized into several subnets.
Several APs giving wireless access to users. Printers are all on some of the network ranges dedicated to wired devices. The IP range for wireless devices form another different subnet with no printers at all.
The proposal is to configure a server to act as a gateway to allow AirPrint devices (those running iOS 4.2 or above) to use any previously existing printer from the corporate network. In order to give this service, we are going to install all the necessary components on a Linux box running CentOS 5.x (5.6 at the time of writing).
These steps are taken from an article of Ryan Finnie.
First step is to install all the printers to be "exported" in this server. This task is optional, the gateway could export any available printer (either network printers or those served by other computers). The goal of this first step is to centralize the administration of the printers, and to be able to differentiate the AirPrint related stuff from the rest of the system, in order to allocate the cause of possible problems. This step is also very recommendable in order to automatically generate in a further step some necessary configuration files.
So, we enable CUPS in the server (if not already done), then we setup the remote printers and finally we make some changes to allow print sharing. Additionally we allow the CUPS server listening on its public interface instead of just listening on localhost.
# Modifications to the file /etc/cups/cupsd.conf
Listen 10.36.11.22:631
ServerAlias *
Browsing On
As stated above, AirPrint does not require printer-specific drivers or setup tasks. AirPrint achieves this goal by means of bonjour, the Apple implementation of the zeroconf mechanism.
According to wikipedia, Zero configuration networking (zeroconf), is a set of techniques that automatically creates a usable Internet Protocol (IP) network without manual operator intervention or special configuration servers.
On the other side, Avahi is a free Zeroconf implementation available for Linux and BSDs. The solution is to use avahi to announce the desired printers.
Creation of the avahi configuration files for the printers is not an easy task. Luckily, Timothy J. Fontaine wrote a script to automatically generate the avahi configuration file from the CUPS printer definitions existing on the system. So, the next step is to download or copy that script in our system to create our own avahi configuration files with no effort.
In order to run this script, we need to install the package providing the bindings between CUPS and python.
In many systems this package is named "pycups", but in CentOS this is provided by "system-config-printer-libs". We proceed to install it.
# yum install system-config-printer-libs
The script requires python >=2.5, but since we are using CentOS 5.x, our system has just python 2.4.3 installed. If we try to execute the script, we will obtain the following error:
# python airprint-generate.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "airprint-generate.py", line 46, in ?
raise 'Failed to find python libxml or elementtree, please install one of those or use python >= 2.5'
Failed to find python libxml or elementtree, please install one of those or use python >= 2.5
In this case, it becomes necessary to make some modifications to the script. This can be done applying this patch, or just editing the file and changing line #43
# vi airprint-generate.patch
43c43
< from elementtree import Element, ElementTree, tostring
---
> from cElementTree import Element, ElementTree, tostring
Once created the patch file, we apply it to the script:
# patch airprint-generate.py airprint-generate.patch
# python airprint-generate.py
Once patched, we can run the script and we will obtain the files to configure avahi. Just copy these files to the avahi directory and reload (or restart) the service.
# cp AirPrint-*.service /etc/avahi/services/
# service avahi-daemon reload
In this step, you should be able to print via AirPrint if your CentOS has an IP on the same subnet of your iPxx devices. This may happen in small ofices or domestic networks, if the CentOS box uses a wireless connection, but it is not the usual scenario in medium or large size corporate networks. This second scenario will be covered in the next blog entry.
