So maybe your printer already advertises mDNS on the LAN, as mine does, but doesn’t pass out all the parameters AirPrint devices expect to see.  From what I’ve been able to determine from a variety of sources, here’s what I know:

• IPP is used for the actual printing
• Either mDNS or DNS-SD for advertising the service availability
  • mDNS for local LAN
  • DNS-SD for wide-area support
  • DNS-SD announcement is in _universal._sub._ipp._tcp
• AirPrint requires a TXT record called URF
  • All current AirPrint apps seem to print as PDF, but field opens the door for additional formats – PDF support will be key further down in the process

So, what do you need to make this work?

1. A printer that supports printing via IPP
2. A server that can run cups & avahi
3. A suitable printer driver for cups that supports your printer and can handle PDF documents (foomatic, gutenprint, etc. are fine choices)

I opted to create a VM on my existing VMware ESXi server at home.  I used the FreeBSd 8.2 x86 (i.e. 32-bit) version.  I just did a basic install, then added packages from the CLI later.  I installed the packages I needed:

pkg_add -r avahi cups gutenprint-cups py26-cups

This will pull the packages for avahi (mDNS server), cups, the Gutenprint cups drivers and the python interface to cups.

First, you’ll want to configure cups so that everything on your local LAN can print to the cups server.  This is covered quite well in the cups docs, so I’ll omit those directions.  Next, add your printer to the cups server.  Again, this is a very simple process, so I’ll omit that as well.  After you get the printer setup on the cups side, print a test page to be sure the communication between your cups instance and the printer is functioning.  Got it working?  Good.

Next, you’ll run a script from a guy named TJ Fontaine that generates the Avahi service file.  So, the script talks to your cups server and pulls the list of available printers, and spits out service files for them.  I wasn’t thrilled with the quality of the XML that got shot out by the program – it was almost all on a single line.  I took the time to break the lines and indent properly, and for my HP LaserJet 2420dn, I wound up with:

[airprint:root](04:47 PM)
/root# cat /usr/local/etc/avahi/services/AirPrint-OfficeLaser.service
<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no' ?>
<!DOCTYPE service-group  SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">
<service-group>
<name replace-wildcards="yes">AirPrint OfficeLaser @ %h</name>
<service>
        <type>_ipp._tcp</type>
        <subtype>_universal._sub._ipp._tcp</subtype>
        <port>631</port>
        <txt-record>txtvers=1</txt-record>
        <txt-record>qtotal=1</txt-record>
        <txt-record>Transparent=T</txt-record>
        <txt-record>URF=none</txt-record>
        <txt-record>rp=printers/OfficeLaser</txt-record>
        <txt-record>note=hp LaserJet 2420</txt-record>
        <txt-record>product=(GPL Ghostscript)</txt-record>
        <txt-record>printer-state=3</txt-record>
        <txt-record>printer-type=0x21014</txt-record>
        <txt-record>pdl=application/octet-stream,application/pdf,application/postscript,application/vnd.cups-raster,image/gif,image/jpeg,image/png,image/tiff,text/html,text/plain,application/vnd.cups-banner,application/vnd.cups-postscript,application/vnd.cups-raw</txt-record>
</service>
</service-group>

Drop this in /usr/local/etc/avahi/services, and Avahi will start advertising the service.  You’re going to need to generate your own service file, but with the script linked above, this is pretty simple.

Now, go grab an iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad running iOS 4.2 or later.  Launch Safari, print something.  Your newly created printer should show up as available.  Print there, and whammo, you’re done.

1. No RAID
2. Onboard NIC required significant fiddling to get working under ESXi 3.5u4
3. No onboard video, so I needed a video card, plus a network card to get going (the real root cause of #1 above).
4. A bit loud.  The system wasn’t terribly loud, but for something that’s on full-time in the background in my office, it could be distracting at times.

So here we are, it’s a brand-new year, so the big project was an upgrade, inspired by some requirements I found with a project at work.  In the end, the old server was converted into a workstation and now has a happy home.  So what’s the current system?  Another Shuttle XPC.  This time, it’s the SG45H7.  This is a slightly smaller chassis than the already small SP35P2 Pro.  The SP line has space for 2 hard drives up top, above the optical drive that the SG line lacks, resulting in a shorter case.  The SG45H7 is targeted as an HTPC, and includes onboard video with both SVGA and HDMI outputs.  Further, it includes 2 expansion slots, one PCIe x16 and one PCI.

Shuttle SG45H7 Case

System preparation was pretty straight forward.  I followed the basic Shuttle directions for installing the Intel Core 2 Quad 9550  CPU, and the 8GB of DDR2-800 RAM (the ram shifted over from the SP35P2 Pro).  With the latest BIOS upgrade, (which I applied first) the SG45H7 can handle 4x 4GB DIMMs, for a total of 16GB of RAM.  Not too shabby!

The system came with 3 internal SATA-II ports, only 2 of which were pre-cabled (1 extra cable in the box though), and an IDE cable for use with an IDE optical drive.  I removed the IDE cable and one of the 2 SATA cables, which gave me room to run a SAS SFF-8087 to 4x SATA break-out cable through the wiring channel along with the remaining system SATA cable.  The SATA cable was used for a DVD-RW drive (I picked the cheapest Lite-On DVD-RW drive that Newegg was selling at the time), and 2 of the 4 SATA connectors on the break-out cable were for the 2x 1TB Samsung HDDs I installed.  Starring as the RAID controller was an LSI 8344ELP PCIe x4 card.  I got a new card that was actually an HP OEM version.  It’s really HP only as far as the sticker goes.  It still runs the LSI firmware, and happily accepted the latest firmware from the LSI website.  I’ve used this card a number of times now in other system builds, and it works very well, in addition to the low cost (around $150).  That’s right, $150 for a PCIe x4 RAID card that’s real, honest-to-goodness hardware RAID with 8 ports, supports use of SAS expanders to accommodate up to 32 total drives and supports RAID 0 / 1 / 5 / 10 / 50.  Yes, I see the word “obselete” in the URL on LSI’s website, but I’m not terribly bothered by that, since there is excellent support for the card.  Driver support is excellent, and there was a firmware update in November, 2009.  Doesn’t seem all that obselete to me.

Since the onboard NIC was also not supported by ESXi 4.0 update 1, I opted for an Intel Pro 1000 GT PCI NIC.  This was my only quibble with the build.  If this system had both onboard video, and 2 PCIe slots, I could have used a multi-port NIC from Intel.  Now that this build is complete, Shuttle will probably truck out a new version of this model that includes 2 PCIe x16 slots, keeping the onboard video.  I’ll save that for the 3.0 version of the project, maybe in 12-18 months.

After I completed the hardware build, I formatted a USB stick to be bootable, using Method 2, as shown on bootdisk.com.  On that bootable USB stick, I dropped the Shuttle BIOS upgrade files, as well as the RAID controller firmware update.  Then, I booted from the stick and did the upgrades needed.  That took a couple of reboots and probably 10 minutes to complete.  After that, I built the RAID, from the LSI card BIOS, which only took a few minutes, since I was just simply creating a blank RAID-1 volume from a couple of empty drives.

Lastly, I installed VMware ESXi 4.0 update 1, and frankly, it was the most uneventful part of the process.  Why?  It took a good 5 minutes and almost no interaction to complete.  The final migration step was to move VMs over, update the VMware Tools and upgrade Virtual Hardware.

I was tired of performance that VMware Server offered, along with its baggage.  For instance, the Web UI suffered from frequent crashes, and it was also fairly slow.  Having had great success in the lab at the office with VMware ESXi, I decided that was the way to go.  ESXi 4.0 is still fairly new, and I’ve had some trouble with my SSL VM on it, so I decided to sit that one out for a bit, leaving me with 3.5u4.

Next hurdle – my hardware.  I use a Shuttle XPC for my server.  It’s small, and doesn’t inhale too much power, so I found it to be a good choice as a Linux server, what it’s spent most of its time as.  Unfortunately, as it uses a Marvell Ethernet chipset (the sky2 driver), and that’s not on the VMware HCL, there wasn’t a driver for it.  But then, KernelCrash to the rescue.  The author gives very nice build instructions to get a mod_sky2.0 driver that works on ESXi 3.5u4.  It’s been good enough that I haven’t noticed any problems with performance or functionality.

I did have to give up my Linux software raid, so at the moment, I’m sort of running without a net.  My plan is to add an external RAID box, either connected via eSATA or 1GbE NAS.  Obviously eSATA will perform better, but I’m not yet convinced I’ll see much of a practical performance difference.  I’ll add a new Intel e1000 NIC to the system dedicated to storage if I do that.  Anyone have thoughts on VMware iSCSI vs NFS performance?

Now I’ve got VMs for my SSL VPN, my File/Pri DNS/DHCP/kitchen sink server, a secondary DNS, and a FreeNAS, as well as some assorted client systems to test various things.  All in all, it’s worked very well.

If you want to go straight to ESXi 4.0, KernelCrash has you covered there as well.

Bookmarklets

Bookmarklets rock.  They’re great timesavers, and a worthy addition to your browser’s bookmark bar.

So, what’s a bookmarklet?  In short, a bookmark, typically constructed with JavaScript that does a specific task.  For example, emailing some data via your favorite webmail provider, or checking Bugmenot for a login to a site you don’t really want to register for, or generating a shorter URL for a site.  Here are the ones I keep around.  Hopefully you’ll use some of them.  To grab them, mouse over the link and drag to your browser’s bookmark bar.  I recommend you make a folder on your bookmark bar and toss your bookmarklets in that folder (that’s what I do).

Here’s the breakdown of my favorite bookmarklets…

Google Services

Google This: Select some text on a page, click the bookmarlet, blammo – you’ve got a Google search for the selected text.

Google Images: Select some text on a page, click the bookmarlet and you’ve got a Google Image search for the selected text.

GAppMail This: Send the selected text via Google Apps for Your Domain Mail. You’ll need to edit this one to change out yourdomain.com for what your domain name actually is.

Gmail This: Send the selected text via Gmail.

Google Cache: Pull up the Google Cache version of the currently loaded page.

Google Map This: Select an address, get a Google map of it.

Geocode: Get the Latitude & Longitude for the center of a Google map.

Google Translate: Translate the currently loaded page into English

Web Development

Show Divs: Show the <div> areas on the currently loaded page.

ReCSS: Reload CSS for the currently loaded page.

W3C HTML Validator: Run the currently loaded page through the W3C’s HTML Validator.

W3C CSS Validator: Run the currently loaded page’s CSS through the W3C’s CSS Validator.

References

Acronym Lookup: Lookup an acronym in the Internet Acronym Database

Urban Dictionary Lookup: Lookup a selected word in the Urban Dictionary.

Social Networking

Del.icio.us Linkbacks: Show del.icio.us links to the current page.

Compulsory Login Bypass

BugMeNot: Lookup usernames & passwords for various sites.

URL Shorteners

DiggBar: Uses the new DiggBar for URL shortening.

Cli.gs: Uses the Cli.gs shortening service.

Yup, it was a dead battery.  Fortunately, as it was only a mile, I walked home, ate my lunch, then as Heather & the kids had arrived back at home, we hopped in the van to go back over.  I could have avoided this if I’d simply left the jumper cables in my trunk.  For some unknown reason, I took them out and left them in the garage after I’d last used them.

One jump start later, I was able to drive the car back home.  I grabbed the van keys, ran to Pep Boys and grabbed a new battery, as the old one was the original, now nearly 4 years old, and had a dark eye – i.e. It’s Dead Jim.  Swapping out the battery was easy enough, and then I found a new problem.  My radio has the anti-theft feature that requires a 5-digit code to unlock it.  Fortunately, after a bit of googling, I found that if you sit in the driver’s seat, open the glove box and look at the little sticker on the left side of the outer shell of the glove box, you’ll find two numbers.  The one on top is 5 digits.  Guess what?  It’s your radio code.

Wildly convenient for situations like this, but what if my radio were stolen?  Someone smart enough to steal a radio is probably also smart enough to look at a sticker that’s less than a foot away from the radio, right?