AD Printer Discovery?

Once you have the AD kerberos tickets and the domain information, would there be a way to query/discover printers advertised on the AD domain? And then use that information to assist with adding these printers to the local macintosh?

Or just queues from a specified (via preference) Windows print server?

Most of the printers should be advertised in AD. Which wouldn't be hard to list... Not sure how widespread of a need this is though.

I'd have to think that this would be useful for pretty much anyone running a Windows print server. Currently we have to go through a number of manual steps to add a printer to a Macintosh and part of that is knowing what's even available.

changed milestone to %Future

added Feature Request UI labels

changed milestone to %V. 1.1

Once you have a ticket for your domain, does this get you the printers you're looking for:

ldapsearch -N -LLL -Q -H ldap://domain.com -b dc=domain,dc=com objectClass=printQueue

That should return the 1. name, 2, UNC path, and 3. the printer type for each printer listed as a queue in AD. From there it wouldn't be too hard to show a list of printers and then allow the user to add them to their local list.

As we discussed yesterday, yes, I can use ldapsearch -Q -LLL -H ldap://domainname -b "dc=domainname" objectClass=printQueue

(without the -N) to get a long listing of printer information. Much more than just name, path, type -- though that's all in there.

It will be very helpful if you allow users to explicitly define both "ldap://domain.com" and "dc=domain,dc=com" through plist variables -- particularly the latter as that helps in our case where we only want our users to see a subset of printers advertised on the campus domain.

I will note for the record that while I'd prefer to use ldaps, I'm finding that ldapsearch isn't seeming to respect the certificates I place in my KeyChain.

As far as the selection that the users would see, I'd be interested in the following information being displayed: printerName, location, driverName, and serverName -- this would most closely match the experience of our Windows users.

As far as other information that might be useful... printDuplexSupported would be one. When creating the printer, could use this info (when TRUE) to force the "-o Duplex" option.

Question I have is drivers... we need to specify what driver to use when adding a printer, don't we? How to determine this?

Yes, you also need to already HAVE the driver installed, but in an enterprise, we might just get around this by mass pushing drivers ahead of time (I've seen lots of people alluding to this practice).