Paused Printer

[EliasG]

Has anyone run into any issues with paused printers, and the only way to clear it is with Admin credentials? We have students trying to print and someone has paused a print job and no one can print until we clear it out.

[CAJensen01]

You can find a bunch of ways of doing this. Do a search on the discussions.

Here's an example:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20081107092520601

[jkuo]

@EliasG - you could create a self-service policy that runs a script to clear the queue. Then when it happens to a student, you can direct them to go to Self Service and run the policy.

I have an example script I posted here, which does a little bit more than that (it clears the queues, deletes the printers, re-adds the printers):

https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=18725

[CorpTech]

For what it's worth, I've had to clear out keychain items for printers to fix this.

[stevewood]

@EliasG why not just add students to the lpadmin security group? That will give them the authority to unpause printers. You can do it at login with a script in the JSS:

#!/bin/sh

loggedInUser=`/bin/ls -l /dev/console | /usr/bin/awk '{ print $3 }'`

dseditgroup -o edit -a $loggedInUser -t user _lpadmin

That's how I handle it for my users. Set it to "Once per User" and the trigger to "Login" and they'll get added to lpadmin.

[millersc]

We've had this problem with our AD users. Simple fix while keeping security was:

security authorizationdb write system.print.operator allow

[davidacland]

We've used loads of methods in past years, mostly adding to lpadmin, and a few other she'll commands to clear print queues and to restart them.

In 10.10 and 10.11 we just delete the queue and re-add it. That always seems to do the trick and can be rolled into a single policy.

[exno]

The one issue with adding to lpadmin group is that it also seems to give the user access to remove and add printers.

if this is something you need to prevent then you can do what i have seen some people do and edit the cups.conf file. its located in:

/etc/cups/cupsd.con

and what you'll want to edit or remove the section that starts like:

<Limit Pause-Printer Resume-Printer Enable-Printer Disable-Printer Pause-Printer

That should be the only <Limit></Limit> to remove.

Building that out for deployment would be fun.. might be able to script it but the best (read as easiest) option may be capturing the file with composer and pushing that file out on check in or login or something.