Hi Everyone
Hope you can help. I would like to find out how I can automate the install of a windows shared network printer.
Currently I have to go through the painful process on each machine of adding the printer manually and I wondered if there was some script or something automator could do in this area. The printers are currrently shared with the Windows printer via spoolss option in Advanced.
Cheers
OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5)
I don't have a script to offer but I would like to offer some advice re the protocol selection on the Mac.
When you connect the Mac to a shared Windows queue, you have to authenticate to the Windows computer using an account residing on that Windows computer or an AD account if the Windows print server is part of a domain. So with a script, you would be using the same Windows account for all Mac's to add the printer. Then if at any stage you wanted to track the individuals print usage from the Mac's, the logs would show the same user for each Mac.
A better method for printing from the Mac via the Windows shared printer is to enable the LPR service on the Windows print server, which is an option for the print server role. Then to add the printer on the Mac you can use the LPD protocol and enter the server name or IP address for the host name and the shared printer name for the queue. And you don't need to authenticate to Windows to add the printer, so when the user logs in and prints, their user information will be in the spool file which all print usage software will capture.
windows smb printer install
