installing printers at home

[pty10]

I work in a school environment where we use policies to deploy the school printers the kids will use on their Macbook Air. When kids take their Macbook home, we want them to be able to install their home printers on their Macbook

is there a way I can grant them access to install printers (add printers via system preferences) without having to give them admin rights? Kids at school don't have admin access and from what I can see only admins can still printers

Cheers,

Henry

[CasperSally]

See https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=6947

You'll also need to preload the drivers you want to support. You can download them from apple support.

[RobertHammen]

What OS? If the drivers are installed, and it's a locally-attached printer, even non-admin users can add the printer via the Print dialog. Right from the 101 Support Essentials class ;-)

May want to make the drivers from http://support.apple.com/downloads available for installation via Self Service.

[pty10]

Robert,

Running OSX 10.9.5

[RobertHammen]

I'd make Self Service policies for HP, Epson, Canon, Brother drivers using the packages from http://support.apple.com/downloads and then maybe have one of the users try to add the printer (after running the Self Service policy) from the Print dialog. Should work fine.

[Chris_Hafner]

There are better ways, yet I tend to like pre-loading all of these drivers on our systems and then including the following lines in my first run script which do the trick without much fuss.

dseditgroup -o edit -n /Local/Default -a everyone -t group lpadmin
defaults write /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.printuitool.agent.plist Disabled -bool YES
defaults write /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.printuitool.agent.plist EnableTransactions -bool NO
security authorizationdb write system.print.operator allow
security authorizationdb write system.preferences allow

When a user (student/non-admin) goes into the Print & Scan preference pane they are NOT able to unlock the pane, but can add a local printer by clicking the "+" button. If there is a software driver available from Apple Software Update then it will find it and download it, most of the time ;-)

[pty10]

Thanks guys, will try the suggestions and will comment on the one that worked for me. Silly question, the lpadmin group, where do I find it?

[Chris_Hafner]

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/lpadmin.8.html