Printer Logic Printer Installer

[lawrence_stegal]

We have a new printer management system for our computers from Printer Logic called Printer Installer.

Any experience or guidance on deploying the client?

[jhbush]

@lawrence.stegall we are evaluating this product as well. Please make sure that you have all of the latest updates on your server applied. The agent is just a regular installer package from what I can tell which should just be able to be pushed out via SS or a policy. I would test for sure as the Mac client is new for this company and a little rough around the edges.

[a_hebert]

If you use a policy or SS to deploy you have to have this script ( sudo /opt/PrinterInstallerClient/bin/./set_home_url.sh ) run after the install of the client. If you don't run this script then the client will not load the printers. This script sets the home url for your company which points the client to the sever you have printer installer on. Printer Installer will only run on 10.7 or later. You also have to check weekly for a printer installer update. So far with the policy I have created with the script running after the install I have been able to get a 10.8, 10.9 and 10.10 computers to run the client properly.

[ClassyLee]

We just did a mass deployment of the Print Logic to all of our Mac clients. The product works fairly well but we did notice some odd behavior with the Printer Icon/Menulette that resides in the Menubar. We noticed that the icon shows up multiple times in the menubar on/off on multiple systems. When looking in Activity Monitor we noticed that there are multiple instances of the PrinterInstallerClient running for any user logged in and for our local admin/Casper mgt account. When we had more users log in via Fast User Switching another icon would appear and so on. While the multiple icons don't hurt anything it is somewhat of an annoyance. We reported this to Print Logic and they are aware of of the issue.

[a_hebert]

That's a good thing to know about the multiple people logged in will show multiple icons. I have noticed in my testing the multiple printer installer icons just never paid to much attention to it. We have disabled fast user switching in our environment.

[ClassyLee]

One other thing worth mentioning, there's no good way that we've found of doing a mass (command line) uninstall of the client as the uninstaller is basically an "action" consisting of Python, Bash, and Apple Scripts. You can see it for yourself by doing the following:

open -b com.apple.Automator /opt/PrinterInstallerClient/bin/PrinterInstallerClientUninstall.app

[rqomsiya]

Use this script to uninstall.

#!/bin/bash

echo "Stopping application"
osascript -e 'tell application "PrinterInstallerClient" to quit' || true

echo "Removing services"
launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.printerlogic.client.plist || true
launchctl remove com.printerlogic.client || true
launchctl unload /Library/LaunchAgents/com.printerlogic.client.scheduled_refresh.plist || true
# Remove any scheduled_refresh tasks from older versions
launchctl remove com.printerlogic.client.scheduled_refresh || true
launchctl unload /Library/LaunchAgents/com.printerlogic.client.scheduled_refresh.*.plist || true
killall -9 PrinterInstallerClientService || true
killall -9 PrinterInstallerClientInterface || true
rm -f /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.printerlogic.client* || true
rm -f /Library/LaunchAgents/com.printerlogic.client* || true

echo "Unregistering apps"
pkgutil --packages | grep printerlogic | xargs -n 1 pkgutil --forget 2> /dev/null || true
rm -rf /Applications/PrinterInstallerClient.app || true

echo "Removing web browser plugin"
rm -f /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/npPrinterInstallerClientPlugin.plugin || true

echo "Deleting files"
rm -rf /opt/PrinterInstallerClient/tmp || true
rm -f /Applications/Printer Installer Client.app || true
rm -rf /opt/PrinterInstallerClient || true

echo "Uninstallation complete"

[greg_marcoux]

@ahebert76 This worked for us, thanks for the post!

[jmuchow]

Has anyone had any luck getting PrinterLogic Pull Printing or Secure Printing to work on Macs that are not bound to Active Directory? We just rolled it out recently and found (to our dismay) that domain binding is required in order to associate the print job back to the print queue on the machine. We reported it and are awaiting an answer from PrinterLogic.

[jhbush]

@jmuchow that is due to the service using Kerberos tickets for printing. You could use a free tool like NoMAD to have directory users sign in though NoMAD and thus get a ticket allowing jobs to print. I believe it's also a setting in the console that permits username and password sign in rather than kerberos. I don't have access to the product anymore so things may have changed.

[jmuchow]

@jhbush Thanks for the suggestion but we are using Apple Enterprise Connect to authenticate and manage kerberos tickets. Sorry for not mentioning that in my previous post. This is still an open case with PrinterLogic and I will post the fix once they provide one.

[mahughe]

Very few issues with printer logic since deploying last summer to all of our staff MBA’s. It has saved us a ton of work orders and time. I also created a config profile to ‘trust’ in Safari that deploys at the user level to AD logins. Non AD uses have to manually accept the trust. The client is deployed through a policy to all non student devices. We’ve had very few issues with this product and it’s price is more then reasonable.

[LovelessinSEA]

@mahughe We just deployed PL as a pilot but we are unable to get the extension working in Safari. I'm currently using the Self-Service portal as a gateway to the PL installer and it's working pretty well. Users are able to install printers directly from the SS instead of opening a browser.

I'd like to give users the option to use a browser but PL doesn't have an answer to why the extension won't work in safari. Safari thinks that the client isn't installed and tries to install the client again every single time.

I'm running 10.14.2.
Chrome is playing nice, but Safari hates me.

[lpierce]

PL is not compatible with Safari 12 at this time. PL support said they are hoping to fix this in a future version. Advise your end users to use Chrome or FireFox.

[donmontalvo]

Well hopefully this company understands that as Mojave becomes the standard on new computers, their product is DOA as long as it relies on NPAPI plug-ins. Fingers crossed they're on this...excellent product.

Latest versions of Chrome and Firefox are also not compatible with NPAPI plug-ins. If users are being told to use those (older) browsers instead, hopefully no flags are going to get raised by your Security/Vulnerability teams. :)

[Eyoung]

as an FYI the latest release does not seem to fix (or even address in the release notes) the issue.... Still no Safari support. And the install for Chrome is working... but is generating an odd series of steps to repeatedly allow the plugin. At least it is working.

Build Number: 18.3.1.93 (current release)

Release Date: January 21, 2019

[jhuls]

I've been tasked with looking into this on the Mac side for our campus. If anyone has any tips or suggestions, I'm all ears. Obviously I ran into learning it's not compatible with Safari the hard way before reading that it isn't.

I'm now running into issues trying to upload drivers and I don't know if it's a Mojave issue, Printer Logic problem, misconfiguration issue, or what. I'm not the guy that configured our test server and have already had to go back to him that I didn't have an option to upload. Now I have that option but it asks me to install the printer client which I have and it just sits there doing nothing.

[jason_bracy]

I've also just been tasked with evaluating this on the Mac. Also ran into the Safari issue before finding this thread :-)

Haven't gotten to uploading drivers yet as I'm still waiting for them to give me an admin login to the server.

[lalitha24]

Hi All, we are trying to rollout printer logic client too, however we have to manually enable the extension in safari post installing the client. Is there a way to embed in the script for the add in to auto enable?

[hdharam]

@lalitha24 have you found a solution to the auto enable the safari extension?

[lalitha24]

@hdharam no we haven't

[sdagley]

@donmontalvo I just noticed your comment about the demise of NPAPI plug-in support on the Mac being an issue for PL. They transitioned to an Extension for Chrome, so you're not stuck keeping an out of date browser around. I'm still hoping they'll come up with an Extension for Safari as well, but for now our printer management team is ok with requiring Chrome to add printers via PL.