# Deploying printer setups to remote Macs ?



## gandalf01 (Sep 20, 2006)

Hi,

I wandered if there was any way to deploy connections to the printers on our network to the Macs (OSX 10.4.x) on our network. 
Our Macs print to the printers via IP using HP Socket Direct.

We image new Macs before a new person starts but we dont always know which part of the building they will be sitting in so normally have to go along later to set them up to a printer once we know when they will be sitting etc ?

I hope I have made myself clear ?

Many thanks


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## yamahito (Sep 27, 2006)

Hi Gandalf,

I came across your thread whilst looking for pretty much the same answers.  I found this later, and even though it's horribly out of date (try looking in /etc/cups rather than /private/etc/cups), it looks like it answers a lot of questions.  You'll also probably want to copy or over-write plist files from ~/Library/Preferences and there's another folder in there called ~/Library/Printers.

Personally, I'm packaging most of this up using apple's PackageMaker and deploying using Apple Remote Desktop 3.0

Hope that helps.


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## gsahli (Sep 27, 2006)

yamahito,
Thanks for that. 

I just wanted to give gandalf the basics - The Printer Setup "printer list" is entirely contained in a file and a folder:
/etc/cups/printers.conf
/etc/cups/ppd
(ppd folder contains the PPD for each printer in the list)


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## gandalf01 (Nov 22, 2006)

Hi,

Thanks for your help on this one.

Using ARD, I have been copying the PPD folder and printerconfig file to the remote Macs so that they have the correct printers. However, all these users that I had made this change too found that they could then not print!!
I didn't realise that this would not work until CUPs had been restarted.

I attempted to restart PrintServices using the remote unix command but as the Root account is not enabled on the remote Macs and as the CUPs folder is a hidden directory owned by Root I cannot restart PrintServices. Therefore the only way to get these users working was to restart their Macs and this would cause the PrintServices to restart/reinitialise.

Is this the only way to do this or am I doing something wrong ?

Any help or further suggestions would be greatly appreciated.


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## gsahli (Nov 22, 2006)

Keep in mind, I've never done admin on that scale....

Sounds like a major piece of your setup before should have been inclusion of a superuser admin user in the sudoers file? 
But a restart doesn't sound like a bad way to get the job done.


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