Macintosh support: Printing thru the Central Print server

Our central print server (Fermi-Wprt) has the capability to support the IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) that is also supported by the Macintosh OSX operating system. To configure your Mac to use the print queues available on our print server, you can simply add the queue definition by going to the Mac Apple Printer Interface. You should see something like the following:

Select the ‘+’ tab to add an additional Print queue, and you should see something like the following:

On this interface, make sure you specify the protocol of ‘Internet Printing Protocol – IPP’, use the address of ‘fermi-wprt’ as the server. To specify the queue name, you will need to enter the name as the browsing feature will not locate the printer. If you are unsure of the name, you can go to Fermi-Wprt’s web interface and browse thru the list of printers. (click here).

Once you know the name of the printer, it is important to define the queue name like the following:

/printers/que-name/.printer

(substitute the queue name in the above example).

NOTE: It is important to preface the queue name with ‘/printers/’ and add the suffix of ‘/.printer’. If you fail to do this, the entry made in the CUPS portion of the Mac interface will be incorrect, and you will not correctly be connected to the printer.

The ‘Name:’ and ‘Location:’ fields can be entered with any value you deem appropriate.

For the ‘Print Using:’ field, you have several choices.

Mac OSX is based on Linux, and uses the CUPS (Central Unix Printer System) to maintain queues you setup. You will need to select the print driver when you set up the queue. The Mac OSX has several to choose from, but if you do not find the exact match for the printer you wish to connect to, in most cases, the ‘Generic PostScript Printer’ driver will work correctly.

As an alternate, you can also define print queues on the Macintosh to use the LPR interface.