Best Follow me Printing Solution for Mac environment

We use Equitrac with our Ricoh printers. It works well, everything gets sent to a single queue, and the jobs are released by an employees RFID badge.

I didn't work on the backend, so I can't speak to that part of things, but the only issue we ran into was when Microsoft released the security patched that killed SMB communication a year or so ago. That took the queue offline for Macs for a while until it was fixed, although printing directly to a printer's IP address worked as a workaround. That's not really an Equitrac issue, more on MS and their Server software.

I manage our Papercut environment. Works fine for us but you are still dealing with Windows Print Queues. I had looked into PritnerLogic as I've heard many places really like it... however, I've also read the following post:

https://www.jamf.com/jamf-nation/discussions/14100/printer-logic-printer-installer

I have no first-hand experience though.

PhotoPhilly, we also have Equitrac, but with Mojave we get the "Not optimized..." error when the EQloginController and EquitractPrintUtilityX are installed. What version are you using? I can't seem to get any straight info from our rep or access to these software downloads.

Papercut isn't bad. AD authentication passthrough works fine. The only issues we ever have are with brand-name drivers. EFI fiery etc.

@PhillyPhoto , do you have multiple buildings or are you all in one building?

My company has started to implement equitrac without reaching out to other teams and we are having massive spooling times (20+ minutes) when some jobs are sent from our remote offices. Have you run into anything like this on the macs?

@ddcdennisb You should have local print queues. Having print jobs sent across a WAN is not going to be fun for your users.

@tnielsen , I understand that, its getting that idea through to our printer admins. lol

@ferrispd We don't install any clients on the Macs themselves, everything is done through a print queue added through the Printers preference pane.

@ddcdennisb We have servers in different regions that we connect the print queue to. They do all connect on the back end, so technically you can print to one across the country and it will be available in your office, but there may be a delay involved.

@PhillyPhoto What kind of delay times are your folks seeing if they print a larger PPT or PDF?

@Chris_Hafner - I was wondering if you could share with me how you deploy your printers. we use papercut for our windows devices and I have been trying to deploy this to the macs and cannt seem to get it to work.

@bodeo Check this one out: https://www.jamf.com/jamf-nation/discussions/31539/mac-can-t-connect-with-printer-queue-any-pointers

@ddcdennisb I haven't heard of any specific delay times, just more of a theoretical delay at this point due to the network hops involved.

@tjhall thanks for that. I didn't really give full details.

So at the moment I have got the printer deployed to the macs, but when you send a print the print queue goes to "pause" and even if you click on resume, it spins and goes back to the pause state. I can add print queue manually to the macs going through settings etc and when you print it sends the job to the printer and the user access it ok using their badge. However I just cannot get it to work the same when deployed via jamf

@bodeo And is that installed with a post script that authenticates?

It requires an authentication for it to work (printername needs to be the same as the custom queue)
sudo lpadmin -p "printername" -o auth-info-required=username,password
sudo lpadmin -p "printername" -o auth-info-required=username,password

We use Uniflow and after some tweaking we got it to work for most jobs without issues. We did have some issues with AD authentication and ended up needing to install Enterprise Connect (or Nomad) to keep the kerberos tickets alive. We also ran into huge issues with some PDFs. Depending on how they are rendered certain PDFs could take 20 to 30 minutes for a few pages. We ended up having allow direct IP print for users running into that issue and if they needed to choose a paper tray.

PaperCut in our environment is pretty stable...as long as your AD structure has built-in mechanisms for removing obsolete user accounts.

@tjhall no it isn't installed with a post script. I just literally fill up the printer detail in "Printer" and deploy it as a policy

@bodeo
That looks like you are printing directly, not via PaperCut?
If you run lpstat -s in Terminal does it correspond to the right queue?

This is the way I set it up (then just added the printer in Jamf Admin + the authentication script since it's required for users to log on to the spool volume)

Click “Advanced”
Type: Windows printer via spools
Device: Another Device
URL: smb://IP address/name
Name: "Printer Name"
Location: Floor/Building
Use: select software; Select the apprpriate PPD (pre install if necessary)
Click “Add”

@tjhall no thats tthru PaperCut. the ip address on the screenshot is to the papercut queue server.

when I run lpstat - s i get the following:

system default destination: Secure_Print
device for printername: ///dev/null
device for Secure_Print: lpd://10.1.1.61

One thing of notice is that there is an "_" added to the name which shouldn't be there.

As i said previously, when I setup the printing on a mac manually using the settings, the PaperCut secure printing works perfectly, I just go to any of the printers and use my id card to release the print.

is this the right format for the script?

@bodeo ] Yes, in your case it would be: sudo lpadmin -p Secure_Print -o auth-info-required=username,password
The user should be prompted to authenticate the first time they print (or after the click resumne).

Might be work right-click and "reset print system" in system prefs/printers first (or lpstat -p | awk '{print $2}')

@tjhall should the fact it is "Secure Print" and not "Secure_Print" matter then?

@bodeo It needs to be the exact name (whatever name you've given the print queue) otherwise it won't work.
So usually whatever the system default destination is of lpstat - s

@tjhall I know but it seems the system is changing the printer name to Secure_Print instead of Secure Print and noway in the deployment have I named it Secure_Print

@bodeo So what did you name the volume share? I'd say it's probably better to name it Secure_Print than having a space in the name.