OSOR Forge: Bifrost: Project Info

Summary

Description

Bifrost is a printout management solution with a single central print spool and magnetic swipe card readers placed at each printer that sends the users printouts to that printer.

Technical description

Bifrost has been developed as a add-on to the Unix print server software CUPS and requires no modifications of CUPS at all. Network attached card readers are provided based on a inexpensive WRT hardware running OpenWRT, an embedded version of Linux. Bifrost has been written in Perl and relies on Apache for user and administrative web interfaces and OpenLDAP for user, card and printer arministration.

Features

Bifrost the project

This is a project funded by Møre og Romsdal fylkeskommune (a county council on the west coast of Norway) to develop a \"follow me\" printing server for their Videregående schools (roughly equivalent to high school) with the following basic requirements:

Support Windows (XP and up), OS X, Linux
Use OpenLDAP or Active Directory, already in place with user objects for all users
No domain login required (but supported)
GPL licensed
No need for N print drivers to support N different printers
Easy install on end-user stations

The "follow me" part is specified as follows:

Student submits a print job to a print server (CUPS) to a generic print queue (will be named "followme"). These jobs are held and not printed.

1. Student walks up to a convenient printer and swipes a magnetic card (or enter the pin code).
2. All the student\'s print jobs are sent to that printer.

Pros:

Avoid paper waste associated with un-fetched printouts
Never any doubt about where the printouts are
No accidental grabbing of other peoples printouts

(Initial) Restrictions:

Support only network attached Postscript capable printers
No support for printer feature overrides (eg. no duplex control, etc.)
* can be achieved by driver defaults per printer or multiple followme queues
Need a cheap network attached card swipe (or numpad) station for each printer
Printer-attached card readers or numpads will not be supported

Future plans

Release 1.2 should include: * user data by UID [complete, in SVN] * \\\\

Get Involved

Source RPM packages Available from here: http://bifrost.projects.linpro.no/ Source code Check out the page Source Code to see how to browse and checkout the source code of this project. Mailing lists ¶ We have three mailing lists you can join and post to, if you have questions, ideas or just want to express your feelings. Attachments * userdocumentation.pdf (170.8 kB) -\\\\