Intel Macs, Network Home Dirs and printing crashes

[anodyne]

Hello folks,

Here’s a situation we are currently trying to correct. We currently have a number of G4 XServes running 10.4.7 Server PPC and a couple instances of Universal (AD bound/OD Master config). Our clients are largely PPC (eMacs and iBooks), but the Intel Macs (Ed iMacs and MacBooks) have been rolling in. Aside from some AFP service reliability/robustness issues, the PPC machines have been doing quite well with Network Home dirs. Unfortunately, we have not been able to replicate this success with the Intel Macs as of yet. Certain applications (MS Office apps, Inspiration8 for example) crash when the user atttemps to print. I initially thought this might be a Rosetta issue, but Inspiration 8 is a Uni app. The print job does reach the printer/prints, but we have had to train users to save the document first to avoid losing work … not so good. Our techs have built printers manually, sent CUPS info. out via ARD, nothing seems to help with this situation.

We do not have this issue utilizing Local Homes or Portable Homes (however, with Portable Homes we started to have issues with less than reliable MCX application .. e.g. Dock with Finder and Dashboard only). We most likely will be moving to Local Homes and trying to correct aforementioned issue with Portable Homes, but I would very much like to address the crashing apps/printing issue as well. Any thoughts at all? Thanks much!

Curtis

[sreilly]

I might be having the same issue. We have an AD/OD setup that seems to work fine with our PPC macs (printing and all). Our home directories are stored on a PC server. I tried introducing a few Intel macs into the mix (set up the same way) and have noticed that I crash everytime I print. The difference is that I am more crtain that it is Rosetta. I crash in AppleWorks and Office (X and 2004). If I force local home directories, I print fine. Logged in as the same user on a PPC mac I print fine from the same apps. I printed fine in Text Edit, but when I made it open in Rosetta, I could not print once more. Creating PDF’s are fine. For us it definately seems to be a conflict with Rosetta and windows-based home directories. I would love if someone were able to help resolve this issue.

[dmckerchar]

I am having the same trouble. Trying to set up macs for users with network home drives. (AD setup only, no OSX server). We have Intel Macs, and they crash every time someone prints. Have used the “French Solution” to enable printing, the job goes but the app crashes. Apps include Word, Adobe illustrator.

The user gets left with mulitple printer folders in their /user/library/printers folder. Some of which have no associated owners or permissions. Wish there was a fix for it, at least I know I’m not the only person having this issue.

As an aside, Macromedia Fireworks 8 would not even start for a network user.

[jackhandy]

One of my clients had this same issue. “Reset the Printer System…” in the Printer Setup Utility (it deletes all of the printer profiles, and you need to re-add them.) was no help. We ended up having the user log out of their account. From the server sudo shelling into their account and moving/renaming /Users//Library/Preferences/Microsoft/ folder. Allowed the user to log back in and start up Word (which recreates this folder). I wasn’t able to nail it down to a specific preference file, but removing the entire folder appears to have resolved the crash on print issue.

[sreilly]

Not only have I tried deleting the Microsoft folder, but I have actually deleted the entire Library folder to see if that helped-it did not. The only thing that has sort-of worked (and I have not narrowed down why yet) is creating a Library folder manually on the PC Server in such a way that I did not have access to it. THus, when I logged into the Mac, the Library folder remained empty. When I did that, I could print fine. I tried denying myself access to just the Microsoft folder, but I still crashed. I continue to believe that there is either a preference file or something that is causing the problem in the Library folder. As far as anodyne, I wonder if they actually did the Universal updater (Insoiration 8 is not universal by default, they just released a free update to make version 8 universal). I have been working with Apple on this, but so far no fixes. I also get multiple printers listed in ~/Library/Printers just like dmckerchar. I am going to try to limit permissions to that folder to see if that helps.

[sreilly]

I think I have fixed the issue, but can you guys verify it for me? What I did was deny myself access to write to the ~/Library/Printers folder on the server. Once I did this, I was able to print from all of my Rosetta apps fine. I will keep testing this and post my findings.

[Brian Bowell]

Good morning. I run ICT support at Berkley school in New Zealand. We have had this problem on a set of Intel iMacs bought in February this year. It was not present on iMacs bought in 2006. The only difference seems to be the version of firmware on them.

The solution posted by sreilly worked for us, big thanks!

The downside was that it also disabled access to local (USB) printer queues, and we have a number of these. I found however, that if I moved these queues out of the Users/Library/Printers folder before changing the permissions on the Printers folder, then the user could manage them.

Perhaps other have already done this, but I hope it is of some help.

BrianB

[McTim]

S Reilly,

I just wanted to thank you for this tip. We have been beating our heads trying to get AW and MS Office 2004 to work with NH’s and Intel machines with the same results that we were all having. Your ‘deny access’ fix works perfectly.

Thanks a million. We owe you a beer or 5!!

cheers,

Tim

Technology Assistant
The Bertschi School

[sreilly]

Glad the fix helped you guys out. Too bad you can’t just upload that beer to me. I could use it right about now as I try to get ready for this school year on time.

[vudutu]

We are a small art school, we have a G5 Xserve running AFS, netboot, NFS and Open directory, use Networked home folders with the cache redirected locally, 250 accounts and usually 50 or so users on at once average. Our home folders are on the Xserve NOT a PC vol. I have been following your post on the print crashes I am a little unclear on a couple of things and would like to clarify. I think I may have this problem but I have always had intermittent Word and Photoshop print and save issues. I am just rolling out my Intel image and have seen a couple of Word print problems, nothing consistent. As I see your solution it is to go to the Workgroup manager, select sharing, navigate to the users home folder, navigate to their users home dir Library/Printers folder and change access to read only. What is the downside of doing this, anything?

Also FYI I found this on Apples site, it says it does NOT occur on AFP base networks.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304317

While logged in using an SMB-based network home directory, applications that are not Universal, or Universal applications that are forced to run with Rosetta may unexpectedly quit when printing.
Products affected

* Intel-based Mac
* User with SMB-based network home directory

Solution

This does not occur when using an AFP-based network home directory, however if AFP is not available, use this workaround to print from affected applications:

1. Choose Print from the File menu.

2. Set desired print options.

3. Click Preview.

4. Click Print in the Preview window.

[vudutu]

An update,
This fix seems to work for me, thanks sreilly, the problem was only for faculty users not students and only on Intel Macs (faculty has their own server home vol, I still don’t understand this but I am working on it) I had expected the user not to be able to add or delete printers but that is not the case. I will update if I figure out why it was only faculty.

[vudutu]

Update
I have found one side effect of this, it appears the user gets no print status info while printing, can anyone confirm this?

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