Getting Started With Cloud Printing
Now that every floor in the Forum has at least one cloud printing device with more to follow, I thought it might be useful to provide a few hints and tips on how to get started with cloud printing.
- Setting your machine up
- DICE managed machines
- OSX
- Windows
- non-DICE Linux
- Sending a job to a cloud queue
- Collecting your printout
- Other things to note
- Trouble Shooting
- I tried to release a job and it just disappeared!
- I can’t see a Scan button! How do I scan?
- I tried following the instructions for installing the cloud queues on a self-managed Windows machine but all I get is an error message saying
Windows cannot access \\SERVER\printersWe’re not sure why this is happening but missing out the \printers part should do the trick.
You don’t need to do anything, the cloud queues are already installed on the School print servers.
We strongly recommend that you install the IS cloud printing package. This can be downloaded here.
For managed desktop machines, see here. For other Windows machines, see here.
See here.
It is extremely important that you are using the correct drivers when you send a job to a cloud queue. If you have followed the relevant instructions above, this should already be the case. Since the cloud printers use the same drivers as the existing Xerox printers in the School, any options you currently use for the Xerox printers should just work with cloud queues.
There are two cloud print queues, cloud-mono and cloud-colour. As the names imply, the cloud-mono queue is for jobs which you wish to print in black and white and the cloud-colour queue is for colour jobs. Note that mono documents sent to the colour queue will be charged at the rate for a colour printout.
Jobs are sent to the cloud queues in exactly the same way as to any other print queue, whether via a shell command such as lpr or an application’s print dialogue box.
This may not be a simple matter of walking to the nearest cloud device. Not all cloud devices are created equal and some devices are more capable than others.
All cloud devices can produce A4 mono printouts. The devices on levels 4 and 9 of Appleton Tower can produce A4 colour prints and the larger colour devices on level 6 of Appleton Tower, the ground floor coffee area of the Wilkie Building and in the NE corners of the Forum can produce A3 and A4 colour and mono printouts. These latter devices are also capable of feats such as collating and stapling printouts. It’s important to remember that if you attempts to print out a job on a device which lacks a desired ability, for instance printing an A3 job on a device which only supports A4, then the job may well disappear from your queue but not actually be printed out! All cloud devices should have a poster nearby detailing their capabilities.
All cloud devices are capable of colour scanning
Once you are standing in front of a cloud device with the capabilities you require, hold your University ID card against the card reader, which looks like this:
after a short period, you will be presented with the following screen:
NOTE: If you have not used cloud printing before, you may be asked to associate an account with your ID card. Do this by typing your DICE user name and your University AD password into the appropriate boxes. You should only need to do this once. If you don’t know what your AD password is, Support can help
Most of the options on this screen should be obvious, EveryonePrint is a service which makes it easy to print from mobile devices. More details here
To release your print jobs, press the button marked Print job release. You will see a screen like this:
Remember, on a device which can only do mono printouts, you will only see jobs sent to the cloud-mono queue.
You can select as few or as many jobs as you like. Pressing the Print button will print your jobs out. You can also delete jobs if you’ve changed your mind. Note that jobs are deleted automatically if they are not printed out within 24 hours. You don’t have to stay logged in while the jobs are printing, if you have a lot of printing to do, you can simply set things in motion, log out by pressing the (real) button marked with a key, and come back to pick up your printouts later.
Once a printer has been cloud enabled, you will need to tap in with your card before you can photocopy or scan. A benefit of this is that when scanning, your email address will automatically be set as the destination for the scan.
As mentioned above, one flaw in the cloud printing system is that jobs which the printer is incapable of printing may simply disappear. Once way to check if this is happening is to look at how much you are being charged for the job (this information is displayed in the Print Job Release screen). If you aren’t being charged a multiple of 5p for a single sided mono job or 8p for a two sided job, then you are attempting to print something other that A4 mono. We’ve noticed that applications such as Acroread can set the paper size to A3 for no apparent reason. If you have the misfortune to have to pay for your printing and this happens to you, contact support for a refund.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, the button for scanning is labelled Email
Is there a way to see what is in my cloud print queues from DICE? From a self-managed Mac? (For those of us who can’t remember if they have already sent something for printing or not, and are too lazy to walk to the nearest cloud printer to find out.)
I was going to say no, but then I thought about it a bit more and though you can’t see the cloud queues directly, you can see what the DICE print server or the local print server on your Mac has sent to the queues. Windows users are out of luck though. To do this, go to
http://localhost:631/printers/Cloud-Mono?which_jobs=completed/ (on your Mac)
or
http://infcups:631/printers/cloud-mono?which_jobs=completed (on DICE)
changing the queue name as appropriate. You’ll at least be able to see when you last sent something to a cloud queue!
Craig.
Hi the non managed windows machines information link refers to windows 7, since windows 10 has now been in use for several years, any chance of having some support written for those machines too. Will the drivers be different do you know?
Thanks
Hi Lynda,
Although the page does mention Windows 7, I believe that it is intended to apply to Windows 10 as well and I have tested this out on a Windows 10 machine myself. There is one gotcha though which applies to all versions of Windows and which I will be adding to the article. For some reason, it would appear that attempting to connect to
\\SERVERNAME\printerscan fail with an error message about being unable to connect to the server whereas trying it without the “\printers” part succeeds. We’re still investigating why this might be the case.
Craig.
Hi Craig,
I’m having trouble with the cloud printers too, but I’m not sure what you mean about leaving out “\printers”. The instructions on the central IS webpage say to connect to “\\is-ps-cloud1.is.ed.ac.uk\Cloud-Mono” (or “Cloud-Colour”), by entering it into the Run command line. I’ve done that and they both seemed to install fine (silently, with no confirmation), and even worked for the first day. Now all I get is an error when I try to print to them “The document could not be printed”, sometimes only after several minutes of a “Printing” dialogue box.
I did also try the departmental printer, but nothing happens when I enter “\\SERVERNAME\printers”, and when I enter “\\SERVERNAME” it tells me “Windows cannot access \\SERVERNAME”.
Do you know what might be the problem with the cloud printers I did manage to install?
Thanks!
Martin
Thanks! This change should lead to a lot less wasted paper+toner. Also, it’s nice to be able to walk to another printer without resubmitting the job if the printer is out of action, or being heavily used.
“Do this by typing your DICE user name and your University AD password” — I didn’t know what this meant. It seems the Active Directory (AD) password is set to be the same as our EASE password.
On my self-managed linux machine (Ubuntu 16.04), by far the easiest way to use the printers seems to be to use the existing DICE CUPS queues, rather than follow the instructions from IS to set up my own.
Create /etc/cups/client.conf to contain the single line (I already had this from before):
ServerName infcups.inf.ed.ac.uk
New for cloud printing: if your username isn’t the same as your University UserName (UUN), you also need to set the CUPS_USER environment variable, for me that’s:
export CUPS_USER=’imurray2′
To be able to see the available printer queues in tools like system-config-printer, I needed to punch a hole in my firewall (once only command):
SERVERIP=$(hostname –all-ip-addresses | cut –fields 1 –delimiter ” “)
sudo ufw allow from 129.215.33.0/24 to $SERVERIP app CUPS
Printing to cloud-colour and cloud-mono now just work for me, and I can release print jobs as documented with my university card.
Thanks for this Iain. Although I believe they are by default set to the same thing these days, AD passwords and Ease passwords are two different things and it’s possible that they may not be the same. As ever, support can assist if you’re having trouble.
Craig.
Beware: wordpress has put curly quotes into the commands I’ve given, which means they won’t work without fixing them up.
I’ve managed to print to the mono queue from my laptop, but not the colour one. I followed the instructions at https://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/computing/desktop-personal/printing/printers/cloud-printing-on-non-supported-linux-pcs
I’ve not managed to scan documents. I logged into the printer in 2.37 with my card, then selected “Workflow scanning”, then scanned as I used to, except there wasn’t the screen to select my email address – I assumed that the default (rather than USB) method would send the scan to my email address. It was a big document, so perhaps it has hit an email limit?
Ah, on the “confirmation report” that was printed out, there is a report of being unable to “connect to remote server” (Server name 0.0.0.0, protocol FTP).
Which device was this on? It sounds like something hasn’t been configured correctly.
“Which device was this on? It sounds like something hasn’t been configured correctly.”
My problems with colour printing from my laptop and with scanning have all been with the MFD formerly known as if237c0.
My fault re the scanning: once logged in, I had been choosing “Workflow scanning” rather than “Email” as an option.