Bifrost

Bifrost is a printout management solution with a single central print spool and magnetic swipe card readers placed at each printer that sends the users printouts to that printer.

Technical description

Bifrost has been developed as a add-on to the Unix print server software CUPS and requires no modifications of CUPS at all. Network attached card readers are provided based on a inexpensive SheevaPlug hardware running Ubuntu. WRT hardware running OpenWRT, an embedded version of Linux, is also supported. Bifrost has been written in Perl and relies on Apache for user and administrative web interfaces and OpenLDAP for user, card and printer arministration.

News

  • 2010-12-21 : Sheevaplug standalone flasher available.
  • 2010-04-12 : Bifrost VirtualAppliance available.
  • 2010-01-11 : Bifrost 1.2 packages are available for installation. RPM and DEB .
  • 2010-01-07 : Bifrost 1.2 has been tagged in SVN.
  • 2009-12-18 : SheevaPlug takes over as card reader platform.
  • 2009-10-10 : Roadmap available for projected release version 1.2.
  • 2009-03-04 : Bifrost 1.1 has been tagged in SVN. RPM packages available.
  • 2009-01-21 : Bifrost 1.0 has been tagged in SVN.
  • 2008-10-08 : Digi.no has written an article about Bifrost
  • 2008-01-24 : Knut-Olav has blogged about Bifrost. Read it at planet.linpro.no or Knut-Olavs blog
  • 2008-01-21 : Bifrost 0.9 has been tagged in SVN as we have completed Møre og Romsdals requirements list. Version 1.0 will be tagged when Møre og Romsdal is happy that everything works. We should expect some bugs and feature requests as they test 0.9 this spring.

The name

"Bifrost" is the old norse name of the rainbow. In norse mythology it was a bridge leading from the realm of mortals, Midgard, to the realm of the gods, Asgard.

In modern scandinavian languages the old norse "Bifröst" has become "Bifrost" or "Bivrost".

Bifrost the project

This is a project funded by Møre og Romsdal fylkeskommune (a county council on the west coast of Norway) to develop a "follow me" printing server for their Videregående schools (roughly equivalent to high school) with the following basic requirements:

  • Support Windows (XP and up), OS X, Linux
  • Use OpenLDAP or Active Directory, already in place with user objects for all users
  • No domain login required (but supported)
  • GPL licensed
  • No need for N print drivers to support N different printers
  • Easy install on end-user stations

The "follow me" part is specified as follows:

  1. Student submits a print job to a print server (CUPS) to a generic print queue (will be named "followme"). These jobs are held and not printed.
  2. Student walks up to a convenient printer and swipes a magnetic card (or enter the pin code).
  3. All the student's print jobs are sent to that printer.

Pros:

  • Avoid paper waste associated with un-fetched printouts
  • Never any doubt about where the printouts are
  • No accidental grabbing of other peoples printouts

(Initial) Restrictions:

  • Support only network attached Postscript capable printers
  • No support for printer feature overrides (eg. no duplex control, etc.)
    • can be achieved by driver defaults per printer or multiple followme queues
  • Need a cheap network attached card swipe (or numpad) station for each printer
  • Printer-attached card readers or numpads will not be supported

This is a GPL project and you can download it here, now. We welcome user contributions (see mailinglists, below). If you want it installed as a product Linpro can help you with that, or with further development. Please contact salg@linpro.no for further information.

Documentation

Installing

Check out the Installing page.

Source code

Check out the page Source Code to see how to browse and checkout the source code of this project.

Mailing lists

We have three mailing lists you can join and post to, if you have questions, ideas or just want to express your feelings.

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