When Good Features Go Bad: Sharing Printers with Mac OS X 10.2

Patrick Chinn
Distributed Network Computing Consultant
pchinn@uoregon.edu

Mac OS X 10.2 provides the ability to share printers with other users on your network—but unfortunately, Mac OS X does not provide a way to indicate which printers to share.

Say you have two printers configured on your Mac, an Ethernet-connected HP LaserJet and a USB-connected Canon i850 inkjet. Enabling printer sharing makes both of these printers available to any other Mac OS X 10.2 user in your department (specifically, other users on your subnet).

Now let’s hop over to a colleague’s Macintosh. This Mac also has the department’s HP LaserJet configured in Print Center. With printer sharing enabled on the first computer, the LaserJet will appear twice in Print Center: once as the printer added by the local user, and once as a shared printer. The i850 inkjet also appears in the printer list. That’s rather confusing!

How can you determine whether a printer is local or shared? Here are some clues:

1. Color. First, shared printers appear in Print Center with a pink background.
2. Delete button. Second, shared printers cannot be deleted; the Delete button remains disabled when the printer is selected in the list.
3. Printer menu within applications. When printing from an application, Mac OS X also gives us hints as to which printer is local and which is shared. In the Print dialog there’s a Printer pop-up menu that allows the user to select which printer to use. This menu also features a “Shared Printers” submenu that lists printers available from others’ Mac OS X computers.
4. Appendages. Another strategy to reduce printer name confusion uses Print Center’s ability to append a local printer name with additional text. When adding the printer in Print Center, uncheck the “Use default queue on server” check box and enter some additional descriptive text in the “Queue Name” box.

This hint is limited by several restrictions. First, the descriptive text cannot contain special characters or spaces. Second, in some rare instances, the printer will not work if you alter the default print queue name.

When we contacted Apple technical support regarding this issue, their support staff agreed with our assessment of the problem but couldn’t yet offer a workaround. They promised to look into it.

The ability to share printers is new to Mac OS X 10.2 and later. Other users should not be affected by it, although we were not able to test this scenario.