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I did propose Papercut Hive Lite. It requires a PC to be available full time in the office to act as a psuedo server.Originally Posted by diedux
The cost for Papercut Hive Lite is expressed as a monthly subscription of approx $25.00 per month with install and M&S.
I would be tempted to give them a PaperCut Pocket trial if they only care about secure printing. Yes there will need to be a Mac/PC on the same network as the printer at the time of release but one would assume if you visited the printer to collect your print job would bring your PC with you. Or if someone else if collecting your jobs they have a laptop with them.
This thread is well over 3 months old; I would hope that a reasonable solution has been pressed into place by now.
“I think you should treat good friends like a fine wine. That’s why I keep mine locked up in the basement.” - Tim Hawkins
Toshiba has introduced eBridge Global print that allows for easy remote printing via your MS365/ Google Workspace account to any Toshiba eBridge Next copier.
Far less expensive than Papercut, this Toshiba unique solution is kind of like Private Print via the Cloud with all of the benefits of Follow Me printing.
.. we expect to propose this solution to the Church that was mentioned at the start of this thread this week.
Last edited by SalesServiceGuy; 07-09-2023 at 04:23 PM.
Not sure if you found a solution to this but this something Princh should be able to do.
That IT provider was simply bsing because they didn't know anything about VPNs outside of consumer stuff. VPNs are actually safer than any other method. Why? Glad you asked.
Anytime you expose anything to the Internet, it's an attack vector for malware, hackers, etc. But the only way to print remotely is to expose the printer somehow (unless it's dialing up to a cloud or something, but that's another attack vector).
And IPsec VPN tunnel between two points is like just throwing a router in between them from a functional perspective. Each end has its own subnet range (which needs to be different than another), so if there are 3x physical church buildings then 192.168.1.1, 192.168.2.1. 192.168.3.1 would work.
Each site will be able to ping any IP on the other end (when nothing is preventing it) over their Internet connection. There is latency involved between the two sites since they're not local anymore, but it's tolerable if it's under 100ms (and for printing, tolerable even 10x more than that). So in our example, a computer on 192.168.1.x can ping a printer at 192.168.2.x and 192.168.3.x as if they were local. Neat, right? (Some of you see where I'm going with this...)
Well, since you can ping to then, you can print to them. Not only that, you can hit their web interface as if you were local, you can use them to scan to the computer on the other side--in short, you can do anything you could on a local network. And all of this behind the security of an IPsec VPN tunnel. But what is the magic in that tunnel? Glad you asked.
An IPsec VPN tunnel is a point-to-point connection between two routers on the Internet. They use the IPsec standard which is the defacto standard in enterprise and everywhere else for security because it has some crazy high bit security options as well as insane re-key timing if you want it (how about 4096-bit every 30 seconds? or every 5 minutes?--an encryption algorithm that will take a theoretical quantum computer to break). You can send anything inside this tunnel and it is secure from the outside even though it is traversing the public Internet. The tunnel is created and 'maintained' by the routers on each end of the tunnel. They're not normal routers, but most business class equipment has IPsec tunnel capability built-in. And if not, there are some stupid cheap VPN routers that are available like the TL-R605 that can replace whatever is in place. (There are ways to get a tunnel to work behind another router, but it's hit or miss--I've done it before and it's more complicated from a network perspective even when it is possible.)
So all 3 church sites could be connected via an IPsec tunnel and then their 3 networks essentially behave like one large one. Printers and computers could talk to each other from any of the 3 sites as well as other IP stuff like cameras, video, RDP, you name it. It opens the doors to a lot more productivity, and also is more secure from the outside than punching holes in existing firewalls to let data in or out.
Oh, and this is how we share our Brother machines and use the Scan to FTP feature. Even on these ancient machines that pre-date scan to folder options, we're able to scan from one site to a server in another location, and print as well. We also use the tunnel for so much more since you don't need something that is 'Internet capable' to be remotely accessible.
Some food for thought. Feel free to ask questions.
WOW!
Hans
" Sent from my Intel 80286 using MS-DOS 2.0 "
Wow is right! The concept of IPsec VPNs blew me away when I first put them in practice. At that time we had 4 physical sites that generated paper every day. And getting that paper required a physical trip, but the data on those reports was timely. For years, my parents had set up some summary reports which employees had to copy from the reports to the summary reports and then fax. Well, we went through fax paper like water.
So after I 'upgraded' the fax machines at each site to an older Brother MFC-8460N that I was familiar with since I had one left over from a business from 2007, I set up the VPN tunnels, and instead of faxing those reports, we had the employees just scan the entire reports right to us. And because it was digital, no more fax paper on our end and now anyone anywhere on the network that needed access to the reports had it. I had to be careful about exposing ethernet ports, but that was easy enough by locking the machine MAC addresses to routers and locking out everything else.
We started using the tunnels for a lot of things--watching security cameras over the tunnel, timeclocks over the tunnel, backups over the tunnel.
Today, we don't have any of those sites as we sold them years ago. But with today's ethernet connected capabilities, you can do so much over a tunnel like this--control temperatures, lights, security cameras, access control, printers, scanners, computers--A LOT!
And for a church like this that is growing, it would then make swallowing the cost to get one IT guy easier since he could handle all 3 sites sitting at just one of them. Not to mention the sites could print to each other as needed. (We actually started do that with forms--I had a script that would print a shift's forms right to their printer before their shift. It would freak them out that we could see them too and would tell them to walk over to the printer to get their forms, haha.)
'VPN Printing' can be one alternative for you.
If your office network requires a VPN connection for remote access, printing from a home computer can be done using VPN printing. Set up a VPN connection on your home laptop or computer, making sure it is securely connected to the office network.
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