Hello! Looking for detailed options, preferably native or free, to deploy HPLJ printers with Jamf School. We are a primary Windows environment. Our print server is Server 2016 and mostly leverages a universal windows driver for the HPLJ printers on our Windows workstations. Our goal is to reliably deploy printing to MacOS when in network for HPLJ printers. Open to direct to printer, or through hosted queue on the print server, we currently do not need to account for printing to these. Our Macs are not domain bound and use local non-admin user accounts.
Current method, and challenges:
- Deploy an In-House Enterprise app package of the HP 5.1 Driver Pack (forum stripped the link here, but it's Apple KB dl1888) to a supervised Mac on various minor versions of Big Sur.
- Deploy a Profile with the Printer Management payload defined and an lpd:// path for the queue on the Windows Print Server. lpinfo -m is run to find the specific model name for the profile field. Often, there is no exact match for modern printers. My understanding is that the driver pack is no longer supported or kept by Apple, and this method I'm describing is depreciated in general. PPD path is not defined. I am not sure how to find the correct info for this path. I'm assuming I need to install the printer locally first maybe, then find it on the pilot device and use file://<localpath> here? If this path is for a ppd that isn't included in that Apple hosted driver pack, how is it obtained? I've seen some suggestions of HP Easy Start to grab drivers not included in the Apple pack, but again should I go down this road of finding and updating driver packs in house if this method is being depreciated anyhow?
- Often the queue deploys as a generic printer. It'll print, but with very limited functionality. We've found unexpected items that needed troubleshooting, like spaces in the share name on the Windows server for the printer causing failure on the Mac side, etc. In general, it's a clunky process, and doesn't work well for our scope of understanding with Mac devices.
What exactly is the Apple and Jamf School approved option for deploying printers in enterprise? It sounds like this is AirPrint. Is that correct? If so, happy to pursue it, but finding a few issues there as well.
Testing AirPrint:
- Verify printer supports AirPrint and this option is enabled at the device.
- Verify a local connection to the device over AirPrint using Bonjour discovery and a local printer find from a Mac. This works when devices are in the same subnet, but fails when on another. I can still connect to the printer over lpd as a direct IP device, which makes me think this secondary failure with AirPrint might be limited to discovery and Bonjour not traversing subnets. Is this correct? If so, is there a native/free option to work around this? I am not a network specialist, but our network does allow for multicasting policy and should be able to broadcast Bonjour traffic to and from workstation and printer subnets is this is a requisite.
- No drivers are deployed to the device; this isn't supposed to be necessary for AirPrint.
- A new profile is created with the AirPrint payload defined. I use the IP of the printer (in a different subnet than our workstations), port 631, and the resource path /ipp/print. I use ippfind the get the port and path, obtained in step two while the printer is on the same subnet as the pilot device. We do not force TLS here.
- When applied, the profile will show as successfully deployed, but no printer or queue shows up on the target Mac. I think this is partially successful, as I can still go to "Add Printer" on the target device, and it shows the printer as an "Airprint Profile" device. I can install the profile with a non-admin user, and the printer is added as a model specific printer with-Airprint appended at the end. If this is expected, is there any way to prevent the user from having to accept the profile and add the printer from the list? This is still way better than previous, but again looking for best options that work.
I've got Big Sur Macs, I want the users on those Macs to have their HPLJ printers available to them with the full functionality of the model, and would like to configure and deploy that centrally with Jamf School. Is this possible with oobe options?