Posted on 10-01-2024 05:13 PM
Hello Jamf Nation!
Our Art program recently purchased some Epson SureColor P900 printers. They have a long history of purchasing Epson 3800, 3880, and P800 printers, so it wasn't surprising they purchased this model to replacing some worn out printers that couldn't be repaired any longer. All of them had a standard Apple Installer .pkg file available for download from the Epson.com support site. I go to the Epson site for the P900 drivers and all that's available is a small download - "SCP900_Lite_64NR2_NA.dmg" which inside of it has the "Epson Installer" application. No package file.
I attempted to capture the Epson software and driver install using Jamf Composer, but printing fails on the captured package no matter how I manipulate it - "Software is missing. Contact the manufacturer for the latest printer software." Opened a support ticket and the first reply back from them was to go to Epson.com and select the OS and download the driver for the model I have - which ironically I already stated I did in the opening description of the ticket.
Just wondering if anyone has a source of the Epson 13.23 driver for the P900, a method for downloading it, or somehow capturing it from the Epson Installer app they are forcing end-users to use now. It looks like there was a version 11 driver from 3 years ago in .pkg format but I don't think it works with newer OS versions. I don't have the time/resources to manually install onto 70+ systems if I can't get this loaded into Jamf as a .pkg file. Thanks!!!!
Solved! Go to Solution.
Posted on 10-02-2024 05:59 AM
It extracts all the .pkg in a folder in /tmp named sc-p900 when you run the "Epson Installer.app". Upload those pkg to Jamf.
Posted on 10-02-2024 12:09 AM
Can you tell me how this printer is?
Posted on 10-02-2024 05:00 AM
The install error is not wrong, you need to be speaking with Epson. What you are needing is a deployable or manageable installer, and if you did not get an enterprise focused printer they may not offer a manageable installer. Depending on if their dmg based installer has CLI options, you could deploy the DMG, mount it, and run through the install with CLI but again they have to provide binaries for this to be possible.
The other options is to just grab the drivers from /Library/Printers/ and try to package and deploy them. You can also use composer to take a snapshot of the disk and run the Epson installer to see what files it drops and try to package all of those. Using Snapshots is not common anymore, but we used to lean on it pretty hard back in the day.
10-02-2024 07:37 AM - edited 10-02-2024 07:39 AM
Appreciate the reply @AJPinto !
I did do a full snapshot, as well as the fsevents based snapshot in Composer to build my package that failed to grab everything at deployment. I remember the days where this was common to do as well (been using Jamf since version 6 (2005) ) and preferred not to do it back then thanks to vendors non-compliant installers. It had a lot of components from /Library/Printers in there, so I was hoping it would work. Hope we are not going back in that direction...
My educated guess, without spending hours of wasted time troubleshooting, is that because I'm installing multiple Epson printer driver packages onto the same computer, something may be overwriting or breaking when different versions of the driver are installed using my snapshot package along with Epson's packages for the other models at the same time. I'm sure I could debug it, or capture all the printer drivers (3800, 3880, P800, P900) into one snapshot package that probably compensates for that variable, but would prefer not to do that. It looks like @YanW was able to provide me the guidance below that Epson support could not.
Posted on 10-02-2024 05:46 AM
I looked at this for a good while last night and tend to agree with AJ; I came up with a few things, but nothing that I quite think would work, That said I'll be watching this thread with interest.
Posted on 10-02-2024 05:59 AM
It extracts all the .pkg in a folder in /tmp named sc-p900 when you run the "Epson Installer.app". Upload those pkg to Jamf.
Posted on 10-02-2024 07:31 AM
Thanks @YanW !!! Not sure how that got missed when I was snapshotting from Composer. Perhaps I didn't dig deep enough into the directory tree, or the files were deleted by the time I completed the snapshot. Will monitor that folder on a re-install.
Jamf Nation comes through again!!! Will mark as a solution after testing.
Posted on 10-02-2024 05:04 PM
Worked perfectly. Thanks @YanW!