fakeprinter VS notiflux

The TXT records are based on the Bonjour Printing Spec [0] which list out which fields so it knows the type of the printer and it uses the SRV port to find the ipp port so it can contact the printer.

Further investigation using rvictl (iOS packet sniffing) showed the IPP traffic, which is really http API. It is via this API that iOS determines what paper is supported from what tray.

The path is then clear: create my own mDNS service that returns a printer on my own port, this IPP port acts as a reverse proxy to the real printer's IPP port, but it modifies the "media-col-ready" attribute to make iOS think A6 is loaded into the manual try.

It was extremely painful, but it was done: https://github.com/LittleLightLittleFire/fakeprinter

It was actually couple of weeks ago, but a small project that took mostly just two days to put together and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Notiflux (https://github.com/ikornaselur/notiflux): a small WebSocket broadcast server, the idea being that clients connect with WebSocket (such as a website) and then any source can send a POST request to the API to broadcast messages, allowing for real-time functionality from servers that don't support WebSockets, or you might have multiple sources that each might broadcast messages.

Auth is done by Notiflux having a public key and the sources have the corresponding private key, JWT tokens signed with the private key include topics and scope (subscribe or broadcast to the topics). Clients would auth with an API for example, get a JWT with maybe a 10 second expiry, use it to subscribe to the topics that the API would then broadcast to through Notiflux.

It was an excuse as well to play with WebSocket in Rust and learn a little bit about the Actor Pattern.

If I would continue I'd want to explore how well it scales, how much traffic it could handle and look into horizontal scaling, but I feel like it's complete enough as a toy project.