Simulation of Multiple IP Printer Web Servers

This project aims to provide a simulation of a small partial replica of a IP Printer web server, allowing to recreate an endpoint that offers a CSV file to be downloaded.

This feature was built to complement the printer-monitoring project

Technologies used

• Docker

  • By using Docker and Docker Compose, it is possible to create various containers in order to simulate we have multiple IP Printers connected directly in our physical network

  • So, this way we can use those IP addresses from each container and writing them in the devices.json file available at the app folder on printer-monitoring project to make some tests

• FastAPI

  • FastAPI is a web framework for building APIs with Python 3. Only a small amount of what this framework offers has been used

Considerations

About networking

• In this project, network chosen was 192.168.1.0/24 with a gateway of 192.168.1.1 and containers were configured to obtain the following IP addresses: 192.168.1.201/24 and 192.168.1.202/24

• So, unless your network be the same and you have those specific IP addresses available to assign to new hosts, you should adapt this docker-compose.yml file to your network specs

About Docker Desktop on Windows

• Driver ipvlan is needed to make containers obtain an IP address directly from your physical network. Unfortunately, it is not available on Windows systems at the moment.

• So, to mitigate this problem an Ubuntu VM has been deployed on Windows. Inside that VM, docker and docker compose were installed.

Resources used

• A CSV file downloaded from a Brother HL-1210W Series printer is provided to make it available in the correspondant endpoint to be downloaded

Endpoints

1. Root Endpoint: /

   • This endpoint was created to test the availability of the API
   • It returns a dictionary with a message and datetime information

2. CSV Endpoint: /etc/mnt_info.csv

   • This endpoint was created to download a maintenance CSV file
   • It returns the CSV file

Usage

1. Install Docker and Docker Compose

   sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install docker docker-compose -y

2. Clone this repository

   git clone https://github.com/mvarrone/simulate-ip-printer-webserver.git && cd simulate-ip-printer-webserver

3. Run Docker Compose

   a) Start

   docker-compose up -d

   b) Stop

   docker-compose down

4. Test the containers are working by using a web browser and visiting http://192.168.1.201/ and http://192.168.1.202/

   You can also use curl or Postman

   If working, you should see something like:

   {"message":"App is working","time":"2023-04-28T06:41:52.060170"}

5. Add data printer inside the devices.json file. It must be added in the format of Python 3 dictionaries

   Example:

   {
       "protocol": "http",
       "ip_address": "192.168.1.201",
       "port": 80,
       "path": "etc",
       "csv_filename": "mnt_info.csv"
   }

6. You can now test the other project with the new available hosts

Contributions

Contributions are welcome! Please create a pull request with any changes or improvements you would like to make

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the file for details