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Question

Printers Show "Open Directory" but we dont have Open Directory

  • August 26, 2014
  • 3 replies
  • 54 views
J
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We have windows print servers and windows infrastructure and we are 80-90% Macs on the client side. When you open up system preferences and select printers, you can select the + sign and every printer we have on the print server shows up. We do not want this to happen. We want people to use self service, cause we have the drivers there and the printers are defaulted to black and white. Here are some more facts as I know them.

- We do not have any apple servers in the enterprise that I am aware of. (We have searched high and low)
- Printer sharing is disabled on every mac. - Our macs are managed mobile admins bound to the AD. - Some days only some of the print servers show up in this fashion, some days all of our print servers show up. (We have 13 locations and multiple print servers.)

Yesterday when I was trouble shooting only 1 print server showed. I unbound my machine and they all went away. I rebound my machine to our domain and rebooted my laptop this morning and now all the printers in every print server is available via open directory.

I do not want to disable the sharing view in the print server because that is how our PC users find printers. I do not recall this issue on 10.8 and before, I am only seeing this on Mavericks Machines that are bound to domain.

Thoughts?? Solutions?? Thanks in advance.

    3 replies

    I
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    • imperatives
    • Contributor
    • August 26, 2014

    The "Open Directory" category for printer "Kind" is normal behaviour on the mac for printers listed in AD DS.

    I am not sure why only one print server was visible before the machine was rebound, but if the printer is listed in AD DS then I believe it will be visible to all users with read access to AD. I'll check to see if this can be restricted and get back to you. That being said you should be able to restrict access to the printers via Print Management, or by removing the printer listings from AD DS (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771349.aspx).

    If you do remove the printer listing in AD DS you could get a Windows group policy for each area/department that includes all of the necessary printers and then use group policy Preferences Item Level Targeting to deploy individual printers to an AD Security Group that either includes the required computers or users. If there are multiple printers deployed per individual/machine you could add some additional logic to the group policy that would allow you to set the default printer correctly as well.

    J
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    • JimAllsop
    • Author
    • Contributor
    • August 26, 2014

    Thanks I will get with our systems team to see about the GPO and the printers for the windows devices.

    J
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    • jipidou
    • New Contributor
    • September 10, 2018

    Hey there,

    We are facing an issue there, as we have mac binded to AD but we only want to use Airprint printers, any way to hide the printers tagged Open Directory from the user ??
    Thank you

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