Best Practice for Mapping Printers, IP or Print Server?

[egill]

Hello everyone,

I'm wondering what best practices is to map printers to be installed either via policy or via self service. According to the JAMF documentation it says to use URI or IP based mapping, however, I'm assuming that this isn't taking into consideration that you may have print servers available.

We are revamping our print servers this summer, before next school year, and I'm thinking that I should create new printer packages for self service as well, since we are switching to Sierra. I have been with my district, and JAMF, for about a year now and I've been creating all printer packages with mapping that used the print servers. However, I noticed that most of the printers installed before me were installed with IP's. We haven't really noticed an issue, however, I assume that it would help to have the print server take care of queuing the print jobs to prevent issue.

So, utilize print servers or map straight to IP's? That is the question.

[blackholemac · Accepted solution]

Depends on your goal...if you are wanting to monitor consumption and such a print server is necessary. If you are wanting to monitor print queues and who is printing a server is necessary. If you don't care about that sort of thing, direct connect is less complex. Direct connect is nice for delegation rights to...specifically if you want end users to clear the queues. We have two print queues that are Windows-only based so a print server is my ONLY option for Macs to hit them.

[egill]

Thanks @blackholemac, I'm just wanted to make sure there wasn't some standard or unwritten rule I should be following. I think I'll continue to go through print servers. We really don't monitor usage, but it does help us to know when we have a print server acting up. Thanks for your input.

[bentoms]

@egill Print Server or DNS.. the latter is handy for when the things move about.

[blackholemac]

I wil second @bentoms ...have advocated a DNS approach to printing here, but have been rejected by DNS admins for years...that is the best way to go as it frees to change an IP

[jwilliamtodd]

Good afternoon, I'm new to JAMF and this is the first time posting in the forums. I'm having a similar issue and maybe someone here has experienced something similar. I wrote a policy to map a network printer and it works but it works too well. The policy not only maps the printer I specified but it maps all of the printers that I entered into JAMF. I double checked all of my settings and this computer should not be getting other printer mappings except for the one I specified. I also removed the policy completely and it's still happening. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!