User's Manual

2
Background
Apple AirPrint™ is a printing technology introduced with iOS
®
version 4.2 in November of 2010. It enables
Apple iOS devices including the iPhone
®
, iPad
®
, iPod
®
Touch, and even Mac
®
OS X
®
to print without
installing additional drivers or software. AirPrint uses well-established, familiar technologies already in use
today including Bonjour, IPP, PDF and JPEG.
Xerox is now certified and implementing AirPrint in the latest Xerox
®
ConnectKey™ WorkCentre
®
and
ColorQube
®
devices. However, when these devices first launched, they were not AirPrint enabled. This
document will instruct you on the basics of how AirPrint works and how to enable it on your ConnectKey
device.
AirPrint is a relatively new technology designed to offer users the speed and convenience of direct print
capability from their iOS-based wireless devices without cloud services or proxy devices in the print path.
AirPrint will likely continue to evolve over the next few years as new features and functionality are added.
Still, the basic operation of AirPrint will remain constant and will require knowing a few steps to ensure that
it works easily across a variety of wireless devices as it was designed to do. AirPrint works best in flat Wi-Fi
networks, which are typically found in home and small offices.
To ensure that your infrastructure is ready for AirPrint, let’s first take a look at the basic operation of the
system.
Step 1: Device Discovery – Bonjour
®
Apple is famous for making technology simple, easy to use, and easy to configure for all users without the
need for a great deal of technical knowledge. AirPrint continues this tradition by implementing Apple’s
already well-established Bonjour group of technologies.
In 2002, as Apple was transitioning from its older Mac OS 9 to the BSD Unix-based OS X, the company
realized that AppleTalk™ was becoming dated and did not scale or play well with the now dominant TCP/IP
based networking standard. The problem was that no existing technology offered the same level of ease of
use and device discovery that AppleTalk provided. The solution was to work with the IETF to help develop
and then release ZeroConf networking, which created usable IP networks without manual configuration or
special servers. Apple’s implementation was initially named “Rendezvous,” but was later changed to
Bonjour due to licensing issues. Bonjour attempted--and succeeded-- in bringing AppleTalk’s easy device
and service discovery, address assignment, and user friendly host name resolution over the TCP/IP based
suite of protocols, using already existing standards like Automatic IP address acquisition (AutoIP), and
multicast Domain Name Services (mDNS), and DNS-SD (DNS service discovery).
AirPrint utilizes some extensions to the existing Bonjour specification to allow for iOS and OS X (starting in
10.7 and 10.8) devices to search specifically for AirPrint capable printers and multifunction devices. The
important thing to note here is that Bonjour is multicast DNS-based and, as such, is sometimes blocked
(along with broadcast traffic) from being passed across subnets. What this means is users will not be able
to discover the printer on an iPad or iPhone unless both devices are connected to the same subnet. Note
that there is no requirement for wireless capability in the printer, the only requirement is that mDNS traffic
be visible and passed to the networks and network segments that both the iOS and printer devices reside
on.
For more information on this, see the reference information at the end of this document for a detailed
explanation of Bonjour and mDNS.