Managed Printers Using Incorrect Drivers

Recently we started updating our student MacBook Airs to OS 10.8.3 which has gone really well.  However, over the past few weeks we noticed some students were having trouble printing to some of our HP LaserJet 4250 printers.  The printer would produce a page, however, it was a single line of gibberish.  Upon further examination, I noticed that the printer had been using a generic driver.

We use Open Directory for our Mac management and push the printer settings to the clients through Workgroup Manager.  All of the 10.7 clients would detect the printer model and use the correct driver.  After a web search I found that I could specify the PPD that should be used in Workgroup Manager.

To remedy this problem:

1.  You must first make sure the drivers are available to the client.  I am going to make the drivers available to my clients as a required install via Munki.

• Here is the link to the latest HP driver package from Apple.  http://support.apple.com/kb/DL907

2.  If you know the driver is available on the client connect to your OD server with Workgroup Manager.

3.  Select the user or group that has the printer settings assigned to it.

4.  Click the Preference tab, then click the Details tab.

5.  Double-click the com.apple.mcxprinting entry.

6.  Click the triangle next to Always.

7.  Click the triangle next to the printer you want to modify.

8.  Select the printer you want to modify and click the New Key button.

9.  Type PPDPath for the new key name.

10.  Set the type to String

11.  Change the value to the path where the PPD file is located on the client.

• For my LaserJet 4250 it was:

file://localhost/Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/HP LaserJet 4250.gz

Reboot the Mac, log in and you should now have the correct driver listed for the printer.