Non-Admin Home Printer Software Installs

[drioux]

We are a 1-to-1 high school and the problem I have been trying to tackle is regarding installing home printer software.

We have eliminated the problem of standard users not being able to actually add a printer with:

dseditgroup -o edit -n /Local/Default -a everyone -t group lpadmin

The problem we are still faced with is that most home printers these days want you to not only be actually connected with the printer during installation, but the driver is encapsulated within a software suite and standard users can not install software. So to them it looks like they can't install printers.

We try to make sure that the most popular print drivers are on the systems, and I don't really see a good way to make something I can push out or put in Self Service for every printer kids have at home...

Is there anyone else who is faced with this dilemma? And if so I would love any suggestions.
Thanks

[Chris_Hafner]

We're an old 1:1 HighSchool as well. We use the line you've posted above in our FirstRun Script along with the following additions:

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.preferences allow
security authorizationdb write system.print.operator allow

In general, Apple Software Update automatically downloads the proper, up-to-date drivers. Of course, this means that we allow our students to access software updates and we DO NOT block the Mac App Store. This works quite well so long as the students physically connect to the printer in question although there are sometimes exceptions where we do have to load whatever specialty software that the manufacturer requires, but that's pretty rare.

Like you we also load all the major drivers from HP, Xerox, Canon, Brother and Epson. We also keep the students relatively up to date via the standard software update process.

P.S. I'm a huge fan of defaults write to edit plists. We sue similar commands to allow students to modify energy saver setting and initiate their own Time Machine backups.

[krispayne]

Here's a quick BASH script that we run in our Self Service > Support Tools.

Works well for our remote users who have personal printers.

#!/bin/bash
# Allow anyone to install a printer
# https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=14640

echo Adding users to lpadmin
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.preferences allow
security authorizationdb write system.print.operator allow
echo All set.

exit 0;