Mac OS X printing to CUPS - More intuitive authentication failure?
- by Moduspwnens
We have a network-wide CUPS server that offers authenticated printer access to all our campus users. We've been pretty disappointed with the way Mac clients handle bad printing authentication, though.
In any other authentication dialog, when a user types in a bad username or password, the window shakes briefly, allowing the user to re-enter. With printers, this isn't the case. It'll happily accept (and even save to the keychain, if specified) bad credentials. The authentication dialog is dismissed, and the user then has to deal with the print jobs showing up as "On hold (authentication required)". To get their job printed, they need to select it in the printer's queue, click "Resume", then re-enter appropriate credentials.
Is there a way to get failed printing authentication to work more intuitively for Mac OS X clients?
We're trying to support a BYOD environment, but our end users have been really confused by this. It's made even worse by the way it pre-populates the user's full login name (e.g. "Smith, John"), which tends to make them think to use their local machine passwords.
