The Bifrost printing solution
Secure, economical and environmentally friendly print-outs!
Print-outs that have not been picked up can be a useful channel for disseminating news, however they first and foremost pose a serious security risk as well as a waste of resources. The solution is the Web-based printing solution named “Bifrost”, an Open Source solution from Redpill Linpro.
With Bifrost, print jobs are sent to a centralised printer queue instead of directly to a defined printer. A print job is routed to a given printer by the users running their magnetic cards though card readers at their selected printers. This avoids printing on the wrong printer, forgotten print-outs and having confidential information falling into the wrong hands at the printer. If a print job is not followed up on within a given space of time, the print job is deleted from the queue.
“The solution is extremely functional and gives us a wealth of possibilities. We can set a ceiling on how many print-outs are permitted per user, and also gain better control over all the printers in the network”, says Øystein Kaldhol, system administrator and consultant for the County of Møre and Romsdal.
The printing solution also supports paid print-outs, which are activated at the user level. Users may in such case purchase a defined number of print-outs. The solution is modular, and may be extended with fingerprint readers, pin codes or other types of identification.
Bifrost functions independently across hardware and software platforms, and it does not lock the customer into specific suppliers. It functions on all operating systems and does not require domain logging. Redpill Linpro has GPL-licensed the solution under version 2 of the GPL license and the software does not require support in Active Directory.
Based upon free software and open standards
The solution is the first that offers this type of functionality in a freely available manner, without being tied to an operating system. Commercial solutions based upon Windows often involve ties to suppliers, printer drivers must be installed for each individual driver as well as expensive card readers often being required too.
Redpill Linpro has developed the solution on the basis of Open Source and open standards. The product was developed by integrating free software such as Apache, CUPS, OpenLDAP, OpenWRT, Samba and Perl. There are no requirements to install the software on the user clients. This keeps the costs to a minimum and poses no limitations for the users.
Bifrost functions as a supplemental product to the CUPS print server and requires no alterations to CUPS. Printers and queues are administrated via CUPS. Bifrost provides supplemental functionality involving cards, card readers, print quotas and the administration of such. Bifrost also contains user-oriented Web pages where users can check their own quotas, delete print jobs and upload print jobs over the Internet.
Version 1.0 was produced for the needs of the County of Møre and Romsdal, however the design is open and may be developed in different directions.
