Airprint capable printer in Library

I use my iphone and tablets quite extensively in teaching. One Idea that I thought about would be having a wireless printer available in the Library that was Airprint capable. If a person had their lesson on their phone or tablet and needed to print something then they could do it right at the library.

Many of the new copiers provided in meetinghouse materials centers are network print capable. This capability can be enabled through the current wireless network. The configuration of the Church provided firewall would have to adjusted to permit networking and printer sharing. This is centrally controlled at Church headquarters. With security an issue I don't see this happening any time soon. Of course this may change once LDS Account is fully deployed for wireless access in meetinghouses.

jdlessley wrote:Many of the new copiers provided in meetinghouse materials centers are network print capable. This capability can be enabled through the current wireless network. The configuration of the Church provided firewall would have to adjusted to permit networking and printer sharing. This is centrally controlled at Church headquarters. With security an issue I don't see this happening any time soon. Of course this may change once LDS Account is fully deployed for wireless access in meetinghouses.

Firewalls don't need to be adjusted for components that are only being accessed from behind the firewall. Our clerks office has a Brother MFC that is accessible over the network. The members of the bishopric and the clerks frequently print to it from their network connected devices.

jdlessley wrote:Many of the new copiers provided in meetinghouse materials centers are network print capable. This capability can be enabled through the current wireless network.

AirPrint is an 'Apple' feature and is not the same as "printing over the network." It allows for printing directly from iOS devices to an AirPrint enabled printer (a function that is otherwise not supported). I doubt that many (if any) of the printers found in most chappels are AirPrint capable.

john84601 wrote:AirPrint is an 'Apple' feature and is not the same as "printing over the network." It allows for printing directly from iOS devices to an AirPrint enabled printer (a function that is otherwise not supported). I doubt that many (if any) of the printers found in most chappels are AirPrint capable.

Yep. We have networked all of our printers/copiers that are network capable. Many of them support Bonjour which makes it super-easy to print from Mac and Windows (if you have the windows print services installed) without futzing with drivers. However, I have yet to see an AirPrint feature, even on the newest printers we got for the Family History Center. This is great feedback, though, and I'd say it's definitely a valid use case. I know FM chooses the printers, but do they pick from a limited menu provided from CHQ? Or can they pick anything in the printer universe? Would be great if we could get it on their menu so we can ask for it.

If CHQ has added additional IP address blocks to your firewall, these blocks often are addressed using non-contiguous ranges. Has anyone else found that discovering a print server sitting on a different IP block than your PC or mobile device was issued is sometimes difficult to do?

If a printer does not support printing from an iOS wireless device (iPhone, iPad,etc), a Lantronix xPrintServer can be connected to the meetinghouse network. This will then make all printers on the network conveniently accessible by an iOS device. I did this about a year ago. It works great. The device can be purchased from Amazon.

I had this running on my clerk computers until the sophos disaster pushed out firewall settings that were never evaluated, but kept in place. It broke airprint for us. I was told the settings were being evaluated but never saw anything materalize.

the issue with the non-contiguous space and airprint will be that of discovery, the protocol is not routeable, so my way around that was to bind multiple IP's to my clerk printers one on each IP subnet. Works for my PLEX server and airprint discovery just dandy.