Installing Printers Via Packages

[bosemachine]

I know Workgroup Manager allows you to pass printing info to other machines but for whatever reason, it doesn’t install the necessary drivers (uses Generic Drivers) which is fine for most but not for some of the administrative types who want their fancy ‘duplex’ and what not ;).

Anyway, so I tried using Composer to snapshot the process from beginning to end of installing drivers and setting up printers on a local account, cleaned it up and copied User Library stuff to the User Template and finally wrapped it all into a nice package. However, install this package on a machine dumps the files there but the printer list doesn’t populate and none of the programs can see the printers.

Does anyone know either A) how to get WGM to pass actual printer drivers or B) what i have to do to get the printer list to populate with the packaged printers?

Thanks!
B

[dead2sin]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: bosemachine[/u][p]I know Workgroup Manager allows you to pass printing info to other machines but for whatever reason, it doesn’t install the necessary drivers (uses Generic Drivers) which is fine for most but not for some of the administrative types who want their fancy ‘duplex’ and what not ;).

Anyway, so I tried using Composer to snapshot the process from beginning to end of installing drivers and setting up printers on a local account, cleaned it up and copied User Library stuff to the User Template and finally wrapped it all into a nice package. However, install this package on a machine dumps the files there but the printer list doesn’t populate and none of the programs can see the printers.

Does anyone know either A) how to get WGM to pass actual printer drivers or B) what i have to do to get the printer list to populate with the packaged printers?

Thanks!
B[/p][/QUOTE]

I handle this problem by installing the required drivers in my InstaDMG workflow and then setting up the actual printer by using a firstboot script with an lpadmin command to actually setup the printer such as this:

[code]lpadmin -p “Printer Name” -L “Printer Location” -D “Printer Description” -E -v lpd://server/printqueue -P $genericppd -o printer-is-shared=false[/code]

This way, I get a clean print driver install as well as a clean printer setup. Another method I’ve started using is installing printers using Munki. You make a package that delivers a command to setup the printer as well as an uninstall.sh script for each printer. You then set the print driver for that printer as a prerequisite so it installs before the setup command is run.

I find that both these methods work exceedingly well.

Nate

[bosemachine]

Thank you so much dead2sin! I’ll give it a try in the morning when I get into work.

I’ve been using the instadmg workflow for about a year now and its been incredibly versatile in conjunction with WGM; however I’ve had some pretty difficult roadblocks made worse by my lack of familiarity with plist manipulation and appropriate usage of first run scripts.

Luckily there’s a boatload of expertise here…thanks again! 🙂
B

[Allister Banks]

Hey all,

Yeah, dead2sin really gave us one-stop-shopping for a bunch of common ‘silent’ setup tasks, instaDMG-bound or otherwise(I just got it working pushed out via ARD send unix task to a bunch of machines). The only consideration you may need to take into account is making sure you pick the right .gz file, if it’s anything like a WorkCentre7435 I pushed out in this manner yesterday, it was in /etc/cups/ppd. Otherwise it may be in /Library/Printers, like the Phasers and Efi-ripped Xerox’s I setup via this command as well.

Allister

[bosemachine]

Good to know! Luckily we deal with predominantly HP printers here so it’s relatively harmless…relatively.

Anyway, I did in fact get it to work thanks to dead2sin’s help…the only thing that kept screwing me up was setting the actual “duplex” option. For reasons that are beyond me, ‘lpoptions -l’ listed the duplexer line as “HPOptions_Duplexer/Duplex Unit: True *False” so I assumed I’d be using [code]lpoptions -p “PrinterX” -o “HPOptions_Duplexer/Duplex Unit”=true[/code]

but for whatever reason, I wasn’t getting the change the show up in lpoptions -l.

After some looking around at the actual PPD file, I found that the actual duplex option was “HPOption_Duplexer”.

So problem solved thanks to you guys! 🙂

[dead2sin]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: bosemachine[/u][p]Good to know! Luckily we deal with predominantly HP printers here so it’s relatively harmless…relatively.

Anyway, I did in fact get it to work thanks to dead2sin’s help…the only thing that kept screwing me up was setting the actual “duplex” option. For reasons that are beyond me, ‘lpoptions -l’ listed the duplexer line as “HPOptions_Duplexer/Duplex Unit: True *False” so I assumed I’d be using [code]lpoptions -p “PrinterX” -o “HPOptions_Duplexer/Duplex Unit”=true[/code]

but for whatever reason, I wasn’t getting the change the show up in lpoptions -l.

After some looking around at the actual PPD file, I found that the actual duplex option was “HPOption_Duplexer”.

So problem solved thanks to you guys! :)[/p][/QUOTE]

No problem! I’m glad you got it all running smoothly. Don’t forget to check out ##osx-server on irc.freenode.net (Some work, some play, great bunch of guys).

Nate

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