Changes

One of my requirements is to not directly expose any server to the internet.  Thus, we cannot use OctoFarm directly to view the printers from a remote location.  The solution I came up with was to take an automated screenshot of the panel view using headless Chrome.  This works fairly reliably.  I had to fiddle with the command-line settings to ensure the html page was rendered completely, but once I got the settings worked out, the screenshots were clear and reliable.

One of my requirements is to not directly expose any server to the internet.  Thus, we cannot use OctoFarm directly to view the printers from a remote location.  The solution I came up with was to take an automated screenshot of the panel view using headless Chrome.  This works fairly reliably.  I had to fiddle with the command-line settings to ensure the html page was rendered completely, but once I got the settings worked out, the screenshots were clear and reliable.

If we implement OctoFarm, I would put a cron job on the RPi running OctoFarm to take a screenshot every few minutes and upload it to Azure.  We could then serve up the latest screenshot and protect it using our AD accounts (I need to double-check with the Tech Team, but I believe this is possible with our current Azure setup).  Members could then use their normal network credentials to access the printer status.  Hosting and traffic costs for serving a single PNG to the membership would be insigificant.

If we implement OctoFarm, I would put a cron job on the RPi running OctoFarm to take a screenshot every few minutes and upload it to Azure.  We could then serve up the latest screenshot and protect it using our AD accounts (I need to double-check with the Tech Team, but I believe this is possible with our current Azure setup).  Members could then use their normal network credentials to access the printer status.  Hosting and traffic costs for serving a single PNG to the membership would be insignificant.  There may also be other ways to host the image (wiki, existing web server in the space, etc).

== Recommendation ==

== Recommendation ==