All,
The second IPP Bake-Off held March 9th to 12th. It was hosted by Novel in
Orem Utah The Bake-Off was an unqualified success. There were 24
organizations participating. The participants were Apple, AUCO, Axis,
Canon, EFI, Epson, Extended Systems, Fuji Xerox, Genoa, Hewlett Packard,
i-data, IBM, JCI, Komatsu, Kyocera, Lexmark, Microsoft, Netsilicon, Novell,
Ricoh, Shinesoft, Sun, Tektronix, and Xerox.
There were 11 IPP Client implementations and 27 IPP Printer implementations.
Out of the 297 possible Client/Printer combinations 296 were successful in
completing a simple "print-job" operation. That is a success rate of
99.66%. The previous Bake off had 8 Clients and 16 Printer with a success
rate of 96.9%.
Other aspects of IPP were tested for the first time including HTTP chunking
and security. We tested 127 combinations of chunking clients with IPP
Printers. Of those tested 118 worked fine resulting in a success rate of
92.9%. We knew going into this test that some Printers did not yet support
chunking. The limited security testing that was done was a complete
success. There were 43 combinations supporting Basic authentication. They
all worked. There were 2 combinations supporting Digest authentication and
they worked. (There was one printer that knew going in its Digest
authentication did not work. The printer participated only to prove it was
broken.) There were three combinations that supported SSL and one
combination that used Basic authentication over SSL. These also worked.
Approximately 20 issues were raised over the 4 day event. These issues will
be brought to the IPP mailing list and discussed.
The major benefit of the Bake-Off was bringing together the implementers of
IPP from across the industry. The cooperation between the engineers was
remarkable. All were sharing their IPP expertise and working together for
the benefit of all. Every participating vendor will have an improved
implementation of IPP as a direct result of this event.
The detailed results of the Bake-Off will be analyzed and a summary posted
to the IPP site. This should be done by the end of this week. Detailed
results and the raw data are available only to the participants. The raw
data will be available in a day or so. I am following up on some test
results that I do not see. I also have to convert a couple of hard copy
tables to electronic format. I will send out email when the raw data and
detailed results are available. If you want the data I have now just send
me an email and I'll send it to you.
Thanks to all who participated,
Pete
Peter Zehler
XEROX
Networked Products Business Unit
Email: Peter.Zehler at usa.xerox.com
Voice: (716) 265-8755
FAX: (716) 265-8792
US Mail: Peter Zehler
Xerox Corp.
800 Phillips Rd.
M/S 111-02J
Webster NY, 14580-9701