Multiple Site locations and the PaperCut Client

PaperCut support is seeing more and more requests around the ability for people to move around multiple PaperCut implemented sites without having to install multiple User Clients. There are a few ways you can configure the PaperCut Client to connect to multiple sites, which is described here.

DNS Redirections

This solution is recommended and is great for people who work on more than two PaperCut implemented sites that require the PaperCut User Client. By having DNS redirect for a specific name, you can have PAPERCUT-SERVER in the config.properties file that will connect on all sites. On each site, the network administrator would set a redirection when users access PAPERCUT-SERVER, where it would redirect to their local PaperCut server such as PAPERCUT-SERVER-MEL.

This will require that your DNS Search Suffix is in a working state. This means that PAPERCUT-SERVER resolves to a Fully-Qualified-Domain-Name on both sites, e.g. PAPERCUT-SERVER.SCHOOL.EDU is a CNAME to APP-SERVER01.SCHOOL.EDU on site 1, PAPERCUT-SERVER.COLLEGE.EDU is a CNAME to PRINTER.SCHOOL.EDU on site 2.

Configuring two sites in config.properties

We’ve seen people also configure the config.properties file to connect to either DNS or IP address - whichever is available onsite. The reason this can be done is because we check the server-name before the server-ip. If DNS is not available, we will use the server’s IP address as an alternative. An example would be:

Site 1 has a PaperCut server name of SERVER1 and an IP address of 10.1.1.1
Site 2 has a PaperCut server name of PSERVER and an IP address of 126.2.2.1

The config.properties file would be configured as below:
server-ip=10.1.1.1
server-port=9191
server-name=PSERVER

We’re essentially giving the PaperCut client two sets of information to check. The one downside to this is that if DNS were ever unavailable on the PSERVER site, we will not be able to connect to that server directly. We recommend using the above DNS redirection steps.