Sharing printers

[ahunter]

Hi,

 

We currently have a suite of 30+ Macs that we manage using WGM. We only manage the clients on a per machine basis and not per user. We have recently had some Xerox photocopiers installed and we would like to share the print queue with our clients so that they may print. It is critical for accounting reasons that we use the Xerox drivers with the printers on all clients as users need to be able to change some settings when they print. We have installed the drivers on all client machines and have added the printers to our management station and allocated the printers out. The printers show up correctly on the management client as we have manually selected the driver that will be used.

 

When the printers are allocated they default to the Generic printer driver (Generic.ppd) I would like to change this and have the clients pick up the correct driver which is stored in Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources. I have altered the com.apple.mcxprinting preference file and updated the PPDURL to reflect this but they still pick up Generic.ppd. The only thing I can see which is confusing me is the Xerox drivers are in .gz format??

 

We are using Snow Leopard 10.6.8, any help would be fantastic.

 

Cheers

[ahunter]

Managed to resolve it, strangely enough it just picked up the drivers automatically after a few days.

 

As a side issue, does anyone know if I create a preset for printer settings, if its possible to have it select automatically for all users that log on?

 

Thanks.

[stevenwba]

Managed to resolve it, strangely enough it just picked up the drivers automatically after a few days.

 

As a side issue, does anyone know if I create a preset for printer settings, if its possible to have it select automatically for all users that log on?

 

Thanks.

 

If the printing presents save as a file, then yes, you can roll them out, never tried it myself.

 

Setting as a default might take running something command line, just checked to see what options are available on the mac server for doing this, and there arent any.

[SC92]

Are you trying to set a default printer, or default print settings?

[ahunter]

Trying to set default printer settings, I have saved them on one machine as a preset and noticed there is a preference file saved for these settings. I want to roll this out to all clients as default.

[SC92]

I think this should do the trick. Select your students group in WGM and then click on the perference option in the top toolbar. From there click the details tab next to the Overview one. Now I think all you do is drag the preset .plist file in there and it should then roll out to all machines after 2 restarts (No idea why it's 2, and not 1). Of course if i'm wrong, let me know as i'm looking to be able to do this fairly soon.

[ahunter]

I have done that but in WGM we are only managing workstations themselves and not user groups. Do we have to be managing user groups for the preference file to apply?

[SC92]

No, you don't have to be managing groups for it to apply. I've just told you something that won't help at all though. I didn't read all of the post

 

If you go to the computer group (3rd from the left) in WGM, and then on the details tab, you then add the .plist for each machine in there.