Yes, PaperCut MF server is supported on Windows XP Professional. It is recommended that you disable Simple File Sharing. This feature causes Windows XP to authenticate all users as Guest, which causes two problems:

To disable Simple File Sharing, open Windows Explorer, select Tools → Folder Options..., and un-tick the appropriate option on the View tab.

Figure B.1. Disable simple file sharing

See Chapter 26, Running in a Workgroup Environment.

There are two main causes of this problem:

PaperCut MF currently supports about 90% of printers on the market. If a printer's language is not recognized, PaperCut MF will not detect any pages and record the print job as a zero page count. This is usually accompanied with an error message in the Application Event Log. We recommend you try the following problem resolution actions in this order:

The Print Provider may be configured via its configuration to ignore a printer. For more information see the section called “Adding and Removing/Deleting/Ignoring Printers”.

PaperCut MF will format the currency based off the operating system's default regional settings. If the default regional settings are incorrect, the format can be changed by defining your location under Options → General → Display Settings → Location.

There are a number of possible explanations. The first step is to open the Print Provider's log file on the secondary server. This file will often contain error messages indicating the cause or type of error. On a Windows system the log file is located at: [app-path]\providers\print\win\print-provider.log The file can be opened from any text editor such as Notepad.

Some common issues are:

The client software needs to contact the application server. For the technical readers, the client makes an XML web services request to the server on port 9191. Most problems relate to either firewalls blocking access or the application server's name is not correctly defined. Ensure that:

The admin user's password is set up on initial install during the configuration wizard. This password can be changed post-install by logging into the application as the admin user and navigating to the Options → Advanced tab, and selecting the Change internal admin password option.

If you have forgotton the internal admin password, it can be reset by editing the admin.password property in the text file located at [app_dir]/server/server.properties.

PaperCut MF is primarily designed for networks managed under a domain and/or authenticated environments. Peer-to-peer networks or Workgroups are however supported. The first option should be to consider requiring users to log onto the workstations using their username and password. If this is not possible, an alternate option is to set up the user accounts on system hosting the printers (system running the PaperCut MF server software) and configuring the account selection popup with the Charge to other users option selected. Users can then enter their username and password in the popup that displays each time they print.

Yes. The client software can be started minimized by executing the program with a command-line switch -minimized. See the section called “User Client Options”.

If the user running the client software is configured to either:

the client software must be running at all times. If the user is configured in either of these modes, the client software's exit option is disabled. Note: The client software will need to be restarted to pick up this option after the user's options have been changed.

PaperCut MF caches group membership by replicating the user/group relationship structure internally in the system. Typically network group membership is relatively static, and is usually set up when a user account is initially created. PaperCut MF tries to be a good network application by avoiding common no-no's such as flooding domain controllers with group lookup requests. This is achieved by caching. Operations such as Bulk user operations, quota allocations, group reports and group filtering all need to do group membership lookups. Caching speeds up these operations and prevents excessive callouts to the domain servers.

The downside to caching is that group membership changes are not immediately reflected inside PaperCut MF. To force PaperCut MF to detect the change perform a User/Group synchronization under the Options section. The system will also automatically refresh group membership overnight during low network activity.

The config area contains all of the PaperCut MF system wide settings. Some of these can be changed via the normal options interface while others are designed for internal developer use and tuning and are only accessible via the config editor. Any changes made in the config editor should be done with care as an invalid entry may require you to reinstall the system!

One of the business objectives of PaperCut MF was openness. The development team actually encourages this and can assist with detailed API documentation and source code. If you would like feedback on your ideas, please email our support team. They would be more than happy to offer advice.

Running PaperCut MF on top of an external database is an advanced option. This is discussed in details in system management section.

PaperCut MF's internal database is Apache Derby - an open source database written by IBM and based on IBM's DB2 Cloudscape database system. The internal database has proven to scale very well and is suitable for networks of all sizes.

PaperCut MF is developed under a number of languages and development environments. The printer monitoring component and other native operating system interfaces such as user authentication are written in C/C++. The application server and web services are written in server-side Java.

The PaperCut MF is designed as a cluster compatible application and supports clustering at all layers of the application. For more information on configuring PaperCut MF in a Microsoft Cluster environment, please see Chapter 22, Clustering and High Availability. If you'd like to investigate clustering options on other platforms (Linux) please contact our support team.