Upgrading your Mobility Print installation to work with PaperCut NG or PaperCut MF

“I previously installed Mobility Print and want it to work with my new PaperCut NG or PaperCut MF installation!”

Before reading through this, you’ll want to make sure that you have completed the following:

• Installed your PaperCut NG or PaperCut MF system.
• Configured your sync source for authentication.

If you don’t have your system set up yet, or if you haven’t set up a sync source for PaperCut NG/MF, check out our Getting Started Guides.

What changes?

On its own, Mobility Print is aimed at getting your printers onto whatever computers you need them on. Mobility Print doesn’t require any form of authentication - just install it and start printing.

PaperCut NG and MF require knowledge of the user that’s printing so that it can properly apply policy and tracking to the jobs that it handles. In this case, Mobility Print will need to provide PaperCut NG/MF the context of who’s printing. Mobility Print queues become authenticated when working with PaperCut NG and MF.

Making the cutover

After configuring PaperCut NG or MF, but before you’re ready to start printing, we need to get the Mobility Print system tracked by PaperCut NG or MF. To do this, the PaperCut Print Provider software must be present on the same computer as the Mobility Print service.

I only have one server for both my PaperCut NG/MF Applications Server and Mobility Print server

If you installed PaperCut on the same server that’s hosting the Mobility Print server, chances are, you’ll just need to restart the Mobility Print server service! That’s it! Mobility Print can take it from there.

If this applies to you, skip to “Restarting the Mobility Print services” down the page a bit further.

I have Mobility Print and PaperCut NG/MF installed on different servers

If the Mobility Print and PaperCut NG/MF services are installed on different computers, you’ll need to take a few extra steps to make sure that your Mobility Print server is set up to work properly.

Start with “Setting up the Print Provider” below

Setting up the Print Provider

The Print Provider service is the way PaperCut NG/MF tracks and reports jobs to the main Application Server. The Print Provider is also how Mobility Print determines which mode to launch - standalone vs NG/MF-supported.

To install the Print Provider service on the Mobility Print server, grab the installer executable that you used for the main PaperCut NG/MF server install. This time, however, instruct the executable to install the “Secondary Server” component instead of the primary server.

This screenshot shows the Windows version of the installer, but the Mac installer should look much the same. For Linux, you’ll just need to copy the relevant “providers” directory over to your Mobility Print server and run through some scripts to configure the system, as described in the link below.

For more information about your specific environment, check out our “Configuring Secondary Print Servers” section in the manual.

Restarting the Mobility Print services

After you get the Print Provider service configured on your server, restart the Mobility Print server service.

Windows:

Mac:

1. Stop: sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/pc-mobility-print.plist
2. Start: sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/pc-mobility-print.plist

Linux:

1. Stop: sudo systemctl stop pc-mobility-print
2. Start: sudo systemctl start pc-mobility-print

For more information about starting and stopping the PaperCut services, check out our knowledge base article here.

Steps after cutover for Windows clients

You’ll have to tell Windows users to run the Mobility Print client installer again. That’s because when the Mobility Print server is configured as a standalone system, the Windows Mobility Print installer doesn’t create an authentication token. Running the installer again creates the necessary token, and will allow the user to print.

Not having an authentication token means that users won’t be able to successfully submit print jobs, so this part is important!

Pro-Tips for Administrators

If you’re using Cloud Print to enable your users to print from home and release to the printer when they get back in the office, increase the timeout limit for held jobs in PaperCut.

By default, PaperCut will hold a job in a queue for between 2 and 4 hours, depending on your initial configuration (2 hours for education installs, 4 hours for professional services installs).

If you want people to print from home and release the next day when they get in the office, you might want to consider extending the default time to enable this workflow - otherwise, your jobs might not be waiting for you when you get to the office to release them! You can check out our knowledge base article here for more information.

For extra granularity in deploying your printers, check out Print Deploy!

Mobility Print offers an awesome way to quickly and easily get all of your printers on to your clients regardless of their OS, domain connection, or location. For filtering the queues that users get from Mobility Print, we usually recommend subnet filtering rules. However, some administrators want extra refinement for the list of printers that Mobility Print can’t provide on its own - things like group membership, specific IP addresses, or hostname structure.

Our Print Deploy solution offers the same level of domain-free printer installation that Mobility Print offers but adds that exact level of filtration that administrators want. Getting started is super easy - just check out our “Importing Mobility Print queues to Print Deploy” section in the manual

The User Client Software (for account selection, job notes, and other client prompts) will still work with Mobility-Submitted jobs From macOS and Windows!

Mobility Print injects the job into the standard printing workflow. So, if you submit a job through Mobility Print and you’re running the User Client Software on that computer, you’ll still receive notifications and prompts for that job. This is awesome if you are just using Mobility Print for domainless printing, but still need to charge clients for billing or shared accounts for things like departmental attribution.

On the flip side, if you have client interactions set up and your Mobility Print users aren’t running the client software (for example, Android and iOS users), you may need to configure a special condition to allow Mobility-submitted jobs through to the printer without the client interactions. For more information on this setup, you can check out our manual page on the subject.

Still have questions?

Let us know! We love chatting about what’s going on under the hood. Feel free to leave a comment below or visit our Support Portal for further assistance.