[herbsman]

I work in an office with a new Xerox multi function printer. We have around 30 mac clients in the office which are all unmanaged, nothing is binded to open directory or anything like that. All of the macs have the correct driver for the printer because our other office also has the same model, but I need to find a way to copy the new printer to all of the macs in an easy way without manually adding them one by one.

1. I tried dragging and dropping the new printer's entry/icon from my ~/library/printers folder and copying it into the corresponding ~/library/printers folder on a test mac, but it doesn't appear in the printer list in sys preferences.

2. I do have a new mac running mac os x server, so I was hoping to enable sharing on the system so that it would appear on the clients, but unfortunately mac os x server doesn't have an option to share the printer.

I was hoping that option 1 would have worked, because then I was thinking about making an automator script to just copy the file into the client macs and voila, printer is ready to use. But unfortunately I can't do this.

Can someone please help me if you know of a method that would work?

[OreoCookie]

Well, you've said the reason why it doesn't work yourself: you don't centrally manage your Macs. Why don't you use OS X server properly? This way you can keep all your Macs up to date, advertise services in a central place, etc. Then all resources which you add to your server will be added automatically to all clients.

With 30 Macs to manage, this effort is well worth it.

[herbsman]

Yeah eventually everything will be managed but not until 2011. Is there a way for method 1 to work? How does the ~/library/printers folder work in OS X ?

[herbsman]

well i've sort of figured out a solution.

My main machine has all of the printers that need to be copied over:

1. copy/repalce the cups folder in /etc into the target mac's /etc folder
2. on target mac, run: sudo killall -HUP cupsd
3. All of my mac's printers appeared on the target mac.

New problem, it deletes all of the existing printers on the target mac's list!

I still don't completely understand how the printer entries in ~/library/printers work. Other folders in ~/library when replaced, copy over the characteristics of the previous mac i.e. ~/library/application support/firefox would copy the entire firefox profile over, but with printers this isn't the case.

[OreoCookie]

To my understanding, what you see in ~/Library/Printers are just shortcuts to the print queues. OS X uses CUPS to manage printers and you've found the cups `preferences' already (they are located in /var/etc).

By copying the cups prefs from another machine, you simply overwrite existing settings and it shouldn't come as a surprise that existing settings are deleted in the process.

If you just modify the part associated to local users or the system, you will replicate only part of the setup. It looks as if you need to do that by hand for each Mac. The only other way out (that is probably slower than creating the printer on each Mac by hand) is to use Migration Assistant to transfer the computer settings from one machine to another. To be honest, I'm not sure whether this transfers printer settings, but it would be reasonable if it does.

This should give you plenty of motivation to manage your Macs centrally
(Whistling `Always look on the bright side of life …')

[bmcgonag]

I have to agree with the others. When managing 5 or 6 macs, it's not as important to manage centrally, but honestly 6 is getting to the point of needing centralized management if you have a lot of changes going on fairly consistently.

30 definitely calls for centralized management. Beyond that, perhaps you could create a single "Master" CUPS to deliver to all the machines before messing with each of them separately. This should provide all persons with their current printers, and maybe a few more. If they have certain print preferences set they may have to go in and reset that, but stuff happens.

[herbsman]

Hey thanks everyone for the feedback I really appreciate it. Yes, it's getting very messy, and the macs are planned to be centrally managed by the start of next year.

[stubakka]

I manage about 200 Macs in my Company, I have a snow Leopard upgrade im doing in the following weeks that will need to have a printer change on about 31 systems. The only real way iv seen to do this on this scale... when you dont use an OSX server running a print share is to Replace the /Private/etc/cups/Printer.conf file with one thats already setup from a system that has all the printers you will need and also adding all the PPD files for the printers to the /private/etc/cups/ppds folder. Im going to mess around with using Composer 7.2 to create an install package that represents changes after you install and add the printers to a new setup to have a PKG file solution that can be pushed via ard but my hopes are not high it will work. I forgot to mention the file copy method i mentioned above is best used with ARD on systems you manage using the copy GUI