Friday, May 30, 2008

Printing on Leopard over a Windows Network

Anybody at a small company with a Mac has faced this nightmare: all the printers are on a domain controlled Windows Server and its incredibly impossible to print on them!

Seems like 'Kerberos Printing from OS X to Windows Active Directory Printer Share' is the solution.

Use CUPS to add a printer and select 

2. Add Printer -> Enter Name / Location / Description
3. Select Device as "Windows Printer via SAMBA with kerberos support" 
4. Enter "ksmb://username:passwd@printserver/PrinterName"
5. Finish it up!

Oh, by the way entering your password like that will place it in direct text form in /etc/cups/printers.conf. Normally printers.conf has user read-write permissions only. So you should be safe from other users on the machine or on the network. But if you let someone use your login for a few minutes (while you are away) - then you are in TROUBLE! They can read your login password in plain text in less than 3 seconds. So be careful!