[Laurence]

I run an office with about 100 Macs and about the same number of PCs. Since everyone has Acrobat installed and most of the people have printer sharing turned on there are around 100 copies of "Adobe PDF" That show up in the printer list from applications. There are also many "virtual printers" we have installed on many of the machines for testing purposes. For most apps the shared printers are listed under a subfolder in the printer pulldown menu, but for some apps (Adobe Illustrator CS for instance) they are all listed in the main list. Obviously this causes some confusion as the employees can't tell which one is their "Adobe PDF" printer vs any other employees shared "Adobe PDF" printer. They look identical! I do have remote desktop installed and active on all the machines, but I can't seem to find a way to turn off printer sharing on all the computers without logging into each one individually.

Another problem is that we want SOME of the printers shared, but not every printer (including virtual printers) that happens to be installed on each machine.

Ideally I would just disable "looking for shared printers" in the Printer Setup Utility, but can't seem to find that option. What does Apple expect people to do in this type of situation?

Does anyone know if it is possible to selectively unshare individual printers. (Hopefully from the command line so I can automate the process) -OR- make Panther stop looking for shared printers at all. (Again, command line would be best!)

Thanks,

[cpac]

sorry I can't help with command line stuff.

But my common sense intuition would be that with that many macs you shouldn't need to be using printer sharing at all. Wouldn't it be worthwhile to set up a central printer server? or just have a printer with its own network card so it doesn't have to be "shared" at all? Doesn't OS X Server have options for managing multiple network printers/permissions/printing accounts, etc.?

I could be wrong, but I just thought I'd ask in case you were missing the forest for the trees.

[OmniX]

i think the previous poster was getting at this, and while it's not a complete solution, you should consider turning OFF printer sharing (System Prefs --> Sharing --> Services) on all Macs except the ones where you actually need it on.
For those, I'm not sure if there's a way to share (or not) printers (virtual or otherwise) on an individual basis.

[Laurence]

Turning off printer sharing on all the computers would be a good idea, but then I have to log into each machine to do it. If there was a command line option to turn off printer sharing I could just use remote desktop to batch process the either floor. Does anyone know if "/sbin/service printer stop" is supposed to do this, because It doesn't seem to work for me. I am testing locally before I send a command to the entire network and it doesn't seem to do anything on my machine.

BTW, "/sbin/service ssh start" does start the ssh server, and service --list lists printer as a service, but it doesn't seem to do anything on my machine.

[cpac]

Originally posted by Laurence:
Turning off printer sharing on all the computers would be a good idea, but then I have to log into each machine to do it. If there was a command line option to turn off printer sharing I could just use remote desktop to batch process the either floor. Does anyone know if "/sbin/service printer stop" is supposed to do this, because It doesn't seem to work for me. I am testing locally before I send a command to the entire network and it doesn't seem to do anything on my machine.

BTW, "/sbin/service ssh start" does start the ssh server, and service --list lists printer as a service, but it doesn't seem to do anything on my machine.

I have no idea; but if you're set on using the terminal wouldn't a "defaults write" style command be able to turn off printer sharing for you? (you'd just have to find the appropriate preference file and figure out what the name of the printer sharing variable is) no?