Automatically Installing iPrint Printers on Mac OS X Workstations

I just went through some fun (you can replace fun with eye gouging pain) figuring out how to automatically install iPrint printers on Mac OS X.

The first thing I found out is that any version lower than 5.00 from Novell is totally broken and useless in every way. So if you are using iPrint from Novell, you should definately download that and install it on all your Macs.

Once you get that done you have a lovely iprntcmd utility that you can use for all kinds of useful stuff (we'll get into that later), but you still can't upload Mac drivers with a Mac. How difficult would it be to just make iManager work across platforms for Printing Novell? Hmmmm?

So now you have to... gasp... use Windows XP. Its easy enough to just load up VirtualBox and run a session right on your Mac. You are going to need access to all the print drivers on your Mac anyways so copying the ones you need to your home directory and sharing them out to your VirtualBox VM is pretty easy and useful. If you don't run it in a VM on your Mac, then you will need to share or copy whatever print drivers you will need to upload to your iPrint servers so you can get to them from a Windows XP box of some type.

So upload the drivers already (RTFM on Novell's website if you don't know how to upload and assign drivers for iPrint). I'm really putting this up here so I can remember it anyways and I already know how to do that! :)

Now the fun begins.

To install a printer just type:

iprntcmd -a ipp://iprintserverhere/pathtoqueue

If you type in the queue correctly it will ask you to authenticate with your user ID and password. Then blam! Your printer is setup... oh wait! I said I was going to automate this. Why the heck is it asking for a user ID and password!? Crap! Why can't it just ask that when you need to print something? Grrr

Well luckily we are not stuck. lpadmin to the rescue... except that nothing seems to work properly with lpadmin. You may think you should do the following to install an iPrint printer in lpadmin

lpadmin -p Printer_Name -E -v ipp://iprintserverhere/pathtoqueue

But you would be wrong. Go ahead try it! Doesn't work does it? Well it didn't for me that is for sure.

For me to get it to work using lpadmin I had to do the following

lpadmin -p Printer_Name -E -v "iprint://iprintserverhere/pathtoqueue?type=ipp" -P "/Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/print driver here.gz" -o printer-is-shared=false

Great! I have to specify the local path to the driver? When the heck did you make me waste all that type with Windows XP VM's and driver uploading using the worst admin UI of the century? Well I thought it would be funny to be honest. But also your users can still go to your iPrint website and install printers on their own. That makes things easy for you when someone comes in with their new fancy MacBook Pro and needs to print. They won't call you to install their printers. See I wouldn't mess with you...right?

One other handy little tip is that you can remove all of the iPrint queues with this little command.

iprntcmd -d all --force

I use that as the first line in my script so it gets rid of any other iPrint queues on our lab PC's and just installs the ones that I want on there.

I hope this saves at least one other person from gouging their own eyes out for 2 days like it did for me :).