"Hold for Authentication" When Trying to Print

I didn't get a chance to try your suggestions because I wound up on a webex with Lexmark earlier and we fixed it. Just wanted to reply and say thanks for trying to help me out with this, I really appreciate it!

In case you or anyone was wondering the reason it was trying to authenticate was because in the settings for the printer Internet Protocol Printing was set to Admin Password Protect and needed to be set to "No Security". This kind of raises more questions than it answers (for example, how did it work before at all for Macs before now? We've never changed this setting... Also, why does the setting matter when it's supposedly using PCL or airprint?) but I'm just happy not to have to deal with this anymore and let these remain a mystery! lol

I'm pretty sure that those are the drivers I tried this morning but your post made me remember the option to reset the whole printing system and I'm thinking I'll try that tomorrow (at the moment I can't get back on that computer...) if I can't come up with anything else. I'm a little hesitant because I wonder if the other printer will do the same thing after it is reinstalled since we've had this issue with that one too but doing this, I assume, should rule out anything like driver conflicts or old drivers. I'll update here once I've had a chance to try it but if anyone has any ideas in the meanwhile please post them.

Regarding printing a setup page I don't remember doing that with this printer but it was a long time ago that this was set up so it's possible I just don't remember. I did go through the settings on the internal page before to see if I could find something like this in there and the closest settings I could find were pins/passwords that could be set for accessing things like the keypad and the internal page on the printer, unfortunately.

Thanks for the reply! The printer (Lexmark CS410dn) is connected to the network with a wired gigabit Ethernet connection and the computer having trouble printing is an iMac Pro running Catalina (can’t upgrade past this, we’re told some software they’re using isn’t compatible by our vendor…) that is connected the same way. I assume it’s not the drivers just because of the lack of updates and them working in the past (we had the same problem on initial setup and also had it occur at random a few times over the years…) but I also tried the more recent generic drivers from Lexmark and the same thing happened. One of the things I read earlier mentioned an entry in the keychain for the printer and said deleting it sometimes gets this fixed but unfortunately there were no entries in the keychain that appear to be related to this going by the names on the list.

Just to make sure, there is no way to tell the OS to just print and not authenticate or to just have it blindly send the job? The options for all the printers are incredibly sparse but maybe there is somewhere else this can be specified?

There are 4 Macs on the network and they all had this same problem initially and also at random at various times but it just needed to be uninstalled and installed a couple of times using various options under the "Use:" dropdown to get it working (it just randomly started working on all of them, often not with the Use: selection that made it work with another computer...); currently it is just the one Mac that it's not working on. The problem occurred moving the user to a new profile, after the move the printers were still installed but this one was doing the "Hold for Authentication" thing and no amount installing and reinstalling it with every option under the "Use:" dropdown gets it going. There are even more Windows machines on the network and it works fine and has always worked fine with all of them.

This morning I reset the printing system and reinstalled both of the printers they had, the Lexmark still did the same thing but the other one (a Canon) appeared to work as it did before. I looked at the keychain and didn't notice any keys starting with the values mentioned in that article but there was one that had the same name as the printer so I deleted it but the only thing that this did was cause the authentication prompt to appear when I tried to print and it began to Hold for Authentication.

Regarding Airprint this along with Secure Airprint showed as an option under the Use: dropdown in the past but neither worked, the same thing would happen (it's enabled on the printer) and now I don't see either selection there at all when I go to add the printer. It has Generic Postscript and Generic PCL options but setting it up with these just results in errors when you try to print.