Technology Blog
Back in September 2021 a colleague on the MacAdmins Slack was looking for a way to programmatically enable the CUPS web interface on macOS. I had recently completed my article “Allow standard users to manage printers with a Munki NoPkg” and realized I could easily adapt it to handle this task.
This isn’t something I use in production but read on for the details if you think it could be helpful in your environment.
Employees at our company all use Standard (non-admin) accounts on macOS and install printers via Managed Software Center. By default this only gives them the ability to install and uninstall in MSC, but not manage queues or add personal printers at home in System Preferences.
Thankfully a simple command that can be run to allow standard users to have that ability has been around for years:
dseditgroup -o edit -n /Local/Default -a staff -t group _lpadmin
(Variations of this script posted around the web include using everyone instead of staff and lpadmin instead of _lpadmin.)
In the past I have always enabled this feature with a payload-free package. However that didn’t present a way to confirm the setting is still active or provide an easy way to reverse it.
To solve those issues I decided to convert it to a Munki NoPkg with logic to do both.
Read on for the details:
In my last post, AirPrint Generator, I noted that one of the potential issues with programmatically installing AirPrinters is that the client computer needs to be able to actively communicate with the printer at the time of installation. This quickly came up in discussion on the MacAdmins Slack.
As I outlined there, we can work around this by generating the AirPrint PPDs and Icons, packaging them up and deploying them to the client computers ahead of time.
This method presents several advantages, read on for the details.
MacAdmins have known for several years now that PPD files are deprecated and AirPrint is the way forward. However many of us have put off transitioning due to a lack of automated configuration options.
That all changed with the HP Printer Driver Certificate Fiasco of October 2020. With the first official remediation option being to reconfigure using AirPrint, this project suddenly moved up the to-do list for many admins, myself included.
Instead of continuing to make users sit through lengthy installs of HP’s enormous driver packages I decided to build on the work of others and create AirPrint_Generator. Read on for the details.