Essential Mac OS X Panther Server Administration

Chapter 19. Print Services

It’s hard to determine what to say about Mac OS X Server Print Services. They’re there, after all—there’s a module devoted to them in Server Admin, and they have a complete management interface, including a suite of options available using the serveradmin command. In my time working with Mac OS X Server, however, I have rarely seen them used. Which is unfortunate. Apple lost a lot of server-side market share to Windows NT 4 specifically because it (at the time) offered a rich set of print queue management capabilities.

So it would make sense for print services to be of a very high quality in Panther, because much of Panther’s marketing goals seem to revolve around replacing NT servers (which are, when they still exist, at the far end of their life cycle). This has not been the case. With little real quota support and a very weak authentication model, Panther Server Print Services remain one of the least robust portions of what is otherwise a (mostly) dynamic and full-featured server platform. Nonetheless, they will be examined in great depth in this chapter, specifically with an eye towards the future, and the underlying architecture that Apple is moving towards.

Managing Print Services

Mac OS X Server Print Services are capable of controlling access to (sharing out) PostScript printers that are accessible via AppleTalk LPR or USB. Printer queues hosted on Mac OS X Server may then be accessed by clients using LPR, AppleTalk, or SMB protocols, as illustrated ...