User authentication does not work for Canon C5250 printer (OS X Yosemite)

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User authentication does not work for Canon C5250 printer (OS X Yosemite)

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In order that Mac users can print to our C5250 printers, Canon recommended that - after adding the printer with the driver - they change their account name (under System Preferences > Users & Groups > Advanced Options > Account name. By using this method our uniFLOW printer management server recognises the user. This method works perfectly. However we are having multiple users that, after they changed their account name and logged off, they could not log on again. We did a password reset for their systems for those users and verified that only the account name was changed, which was done correctly.

Off course we do not want to do password resets for their MacBooks constantly when new users arrive.

What we want

Is a simple solution so users can print from their Mac without a hassle (and possibly without changing their account names in their system).

What I tried to do:

Installed the latest driver for the Canon C5250 printer. I tested this on a OS X 10.10 Yosemite system.
Installed the printer and opened the 'Options & Supplies' menu. Next I opened the 'Printer Utility'.
In the new Window their appears to be a tab 'User Information'. By default 'Login name' is selected.
I changed the option to 'Enter name' and entered my printer account information (which does not contain a secure print PIN, only a username).
I clicked the 'Save Settings' button. Closed the window and rebooted my system.
After a reboot, I did a print. However when checking our uniFLOW (printer management) server, I still see that my Mac tried to print with it's account name and not with the user information added in the printer utility. Therefore I'm not recognised as an user by uniFLOW.

Help.

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5)

Posted on Sep 14, 2015 10:23 AM

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Answer 1

PAHU

Level 6

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Sep 14, 2015 10:35 PM in response to Kim@CoE

The User Information section of the Canon driver is just for the Secured Printing function of the copier - it is not for use with uniFLOW. By allowing the user to change from their login name to some other manually entered name, this can be used for authenticating at the copier using the AD account when it is set to use SSO (Single Sign-On), which is an alternate method to uniFLOW. So this explains why the user name that you see in the uniFLOW logs is the account name for the logged in user rather than the name you set in the Canon driver utility.

So for the simple solution, it is possible to configure uniFLOW to associate the Mac's login name to an AD account using LDAP. This will allow the user to continue using their Mac login name and avoid creating a new account on the Mac. I would suggest you go back to Canon for instruction on how this can be done in uniFLOW. It is their responsibility to get this working the way you want it to work.

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Answer 2

Kim@CoE Author

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Sep 14, 2015 10:53 PM in response to PAHU

Thank you for your explanation. If I may elaborate.

We have 2 situations:

Users can log-in to their computer with their AD credentials.
Users can print directly from their laptop.

On the printer, they use a chip card to authenticate in order to release a job.

I know we can add a additional LDAP login entry in uniFLOW, however imagine that hundredths of new users need to be added each year. We run a daily AD synchronisation to uniFLOW, however we do not know their personal computer name in front. Therefore the user should be able to do this themselves. A simple solution would be that they can add their AD credentials in the printer set-up when using a Macbook.

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Answer 3

Kim@CoE Author

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Sep 14, 2015 11:11 PM in response to Kim@CoE

Users can log-in to their our computers with their AD credentials.*

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Answer 4

PAHU

Level 6

16,717 points

Sep 15, 2015 1:32 AM in response to Kim@CoE

Thanks. The response that you have added above has made the issue a bit more clearer 😁. I had the impression that the Macs used in your site were BYOD. I think the best way to do this would be potentially creating a LPD queue to the input printer on the print server. This will bypass any authentication issues/need for authentication to the uniFLOW input queue.

With the LPD queue on the Mac, when a print job is sent... it doesn't need to authenticate to the server but will send the username and job to the print server to determine if it is a valid user. If the user is valid they should be able to authenticate to the printer using their card, if the user is unknown uniFLOW will most likely delete the job. Note: You will need to enable uniFLOW LPD service and stop Windows LPR services on the relevant uniFLOW Print Server or Remote Print Server (RPS) for this to work.

See how you go with this and let me know if you need any further assistance.

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