All,
I have attached the summary of the IPP Bake-Off 3. I have posted the entire
document to the PWG site. The location is
"ftp://ftp.pwg.org/pub/pwg/ipp/new_TES/Bake-Off-3-Summary.pdf". I seem to
have problems just following the URL. I am able to retrieve the document
with an FTP tool after being bounced several times due to number of
connection limitations at the PWG site.
The Complete results are being sent to the registered participants of
Bake-Off. Any participant wishing to get the complete results should
contact me.
Pete
______________________________________________________________________
The third IPP Bake-Off held October 17 to 20. It was hosted by Oak
Technologies in Woburn Massachusetts. The Bake-Off was a success, though
some participants wanted more time to test with the rich set of IPP
implementations.
Participating companies: Axent Technologies Inc., Canon, Electronics for
Imaging Inc., Epson, IBM, i-data International, Japan Computer Industry,
McAfee.com, Microsoft, Netreon Inc., NETsilicon Inc., Novell, Oak
Technologies, Quality Logic, Ricoh, SEH Computertechnik Gmbh, Xerox
The 18 participants provided 17 IPP Printers, 9 IPP Clients, 2 firewalls and
2 HTTP Proxies. Out of the 153 possible combinations of Clients and
Printers, 151 were tested.
* The overall success rate was 93%.
* Limiting the scope to IPP v1.1 provided a success rate of
96%.
* With IPP v1.0 Clients and v1.1 Printers, the success rate
was 100%.
* The tests with v1.1 Clients and v1.0 Printers resulted in a
success rate of 31%, which is not surprising given that some printer
implementations explicitly disallowed that combination. Some Clients were
able to retry in v1.0 mode raising the success rate to 69%. It should also
be noted that for v1.0 Printers that allow v1.1 Clients the success rate was
100%.
The majority of the failures can be attributed to one of two causes. The
major cause of unresolved failures was due to IPP Clients that had problems
with IPP Printers that sent HTTP "100 continue" messages. This was
recognized as an implementation error. The other cause was v1.0 Printers
that explicitly disallowed v1.1 Clients. IPP inherently provides a
mechanism that allows minor version mismatches to be gracefully handled.
The minor version mismatch was recognized as an unnecessary printer
restriction.
Security testing went well with both SSLv3 and TLS having no failures with
their limited number of participants (8 and 7 respectively). Basic
authentication had the most participants (59) with a success rate of 93%.
The most common cause of failure here was the "100 continue" problem
previously mentioned. Digest authentication was the poorest performer with
31 participants and a success rate of 68%. Only a few of the failures were
due to the "100 continue" problem.
Firewall and HTTP proxy testing was a complete success. The testing with
the firewalls demonstrated that administrators could set policy regarding
IPP printing. Firewalls were able block, selectively allow or allow
unrestricted printing between IPP Clients and Printers. The firewalls
further demonstrated that they could add an additional layer of security
requiring IPP Clients to authenticate to the firewall before allowing the
IPP request through to a designated printer. The HTTP proxies operated
transparently when used in IPP printing. No security interactions or
caching issues were discovered.
The IPP notification testing gave early implementers a chance to shake down
their implementations. Out of the 25 combinations that were reported
tested, only two complete failures were noted. The remaining 23 were able
to subscribe for notifications. There were 19 successful "mailto"
notification tests and 4 successful "INDP" tests. At least two issues with
the notification documents were identified.
The major benefit of any Bake-Off is 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.
______________________________________________________________________
Peter Zehler
XEROX
Xerox Architecture Center
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 139-05A
Webster NY, 14580-9701