SEH Technology primos
The primos provides AirPrint access controls and print auditing at a price small businesses can afford
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £210 exc VAT from seh-technology.com
Designed for hassle-free printing from macOS and iOS devices, Apple’s AirPrint is great for casual printing. Its lack of access security is a major drawback for businesses though: once it’s enabled on a compliant printer, anyone on the network can use it.
The primos from SEH Technology is the answer – a little slab of black plastic that upgrades AirPrint with all the features you wish it had, including access permissions, encrypted communications and print-job logging. It handles print queues for all the AirPrint-enabled printers on your network, and supports local or Active Directory (AD) authentication.
The primos is simple to set up: once we’d plugged it into the lab’s network, the SEH Windows app discovered it right away. Double-clicking took us straight to its Control Center web interface, where we were presented with the printer discovery wizard.
To test it, we also connected an Epson WorkForce Pro WF-4720 inkjet and Brother MFC-L8900CDW laser MFP to our network. Both devices feature native support for AirPrint, but without anything in the way of access controls. Within a few seconds, the primos had spotted both printers and created queues for them. For ease of identification, the primos uses each printer’s AirPrint name, prepended with a global identifier that can be customised to suit.
With this done, installation was nearly complete. There’s just one more thing to do – which surprisingly isn’t mentioned in the primos user manual. You’ll need to disable each printer’s native AirPrint service, or users can simply sidestep the primos and continue sending jobs directly to the printer.
Unfortunately, this may not be as simple as it sounds, as each printer vendor has its own method of handling AirPrint. On our Brother printer, we were easily able to disable AirPrint from the web interface, while leaving the mDNS service enabled to allow Bonjour to continue running. On the Epson, however, things proved more problematic. You can disable AirPrint by turning off the printer’s Bonjour service, but this will also stop the primos seeing it. Eventually, via experimentation, we found that turning off the “Paper Setup Auto Display” option at the printer’s LCD
“The primos upgrades AirPrint with the features you wish it had, including access permissions and print-job logging”
panel had the desired effect of disabling AirPrint while leaving Bonjour running – although it also stopped the primos displaying the printer’s consumables status.
You’ll also need to ensure that users aren’t running any iOS apps that provide direct network access to the printer. For our test printers, this meant blocking Brother and Epson’s own mobile printing apps.
Once all your AirPrint traffic is going via the primos, it’s easy to lock down access. You can create users and groups within the management portal and add them to print queues as desired, or connect the primos to an AD or LDAP server for centralised management. With this done, when we tried to print to a protected queue from our iPad, we were asked to enter username and password, which were subsequently remembered.
Another benefit of the primos is that it can make AirPrint devices available across multiple subnets – something Bonjour doesn’t normally support. It requires a bit of network configuration, though, as you need to set up a new subdomain and add it to your iOS devices as a Wi-Fi search domain.
Although it wasn’t entirely straightforward to get our Epson printer working with the primos, the device is overall a great boon for any office seeking to manage AirPrint usage. It’s not the only option out there – but the enterprise-grade solutions from the likes of Canon and Xerox are far too expensive for most SMBs. At £210, the versatile, easy-toinstall primos is a snip by comparison. SPECIFICATIONS Desktop unit 10/100 Ethernet USB 2 (future use) external PSU SEH primos Windows app web browser management 108 x 108 x 33mm (WDH) 5yr hardware warranty