on the job

After a little searching, I found out you can add printers to OS X from the command line using this syntax:

lpadmin -p Printer_Name -L "Printer Location" -E -v lpd://x.x.x.x -P /Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/Printer_Driver.gz


If you don’t specify the -P option, it will not show up in your Print or Printer Setup dialogs. If you want to include the generic PPD, it is located here:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions \ /A/Frameworks/PrintCore.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Generic.ppd

That path is all one line, with no spaces.

Sometimes, Adobe InDesign will crash when trying to print on a user account with a networked home folder under Mac OS X. Here is the fix that I use:

ditto -rsrc /System/Library/Printers /Library/Printers

I send that command to all computers with the problem via ARD (Apple Remote Desktop) and it seems to resolve all of the issues.

If that doesn’t work, you need to copy or create a Printers folder in the current users Library folder. Drop into Terminal and type the following:

mkdir ~/Library/Printers

Those two methods have resolved most of our InDesign printing issues.

Here at the school district I was running into a problem where if several Mac OS X wireless clients logged into the network at once, everything slowed down to a crawl. After researching the problem, it looked like the user’s Library and Microsoft User Data folders were causing the problem. I tried turning on OS X’s home folder syncronization, but that didn’t work very well, and filled up our older computers fast. The solution I found was to locally cache the user’s Library and Microsoft User Data folder. To do this, create a symbolic link from the user’s networked ‘Library’ folder and point it to a local source. I chose /tmp/UserCache/username/Library. Here is the login script I created to automate the process:

#! /bin/bash

# Create local user caches of important directories
# Written by Steven Eppler 04/04/2006

export PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin

# Set user variable
user="$1"

# This grabs the user's home directory server
input=`dscl localhost read Search/Users/$user NFSHomeDirectory`
nethomedir=${input:18}

# Or you can hardcode it...
# nethomedir="/Network/Servers/ServerName/Volume/$user"

# Check for blank nethomedir - otherwise you will delete
# the root /Library folder!
if [ """$nethomedir""" != "" ]; then

echo $user
echo $nethomedir

# Create local caching directories
mkdir /tmp/UserCache
mkdir /tmp/UserCache/$user
mkdir /tmp/UserCache/$user/Microsoft\ User\ Data
mkdir /tmp/UserCache/$user/Library

# Give everyone rights to them...
chmod -R ugo=rwx /tmp/UserCache

# Create Documents and Desktop folder (sometimes they don't exist)
mkdir $nethomedir/Documents
mkdir $nethomedir/Desktop

# Delete old folders or links
rm -rf $nethomedir/Library
rm -rf $nethomedir/Documents/Microsoft\ User\ Data

# Create new links
ln -s /tmp/UserCache/$user/Library $nethomedir/Library
ln -s /tmp/UserCache/$user/Microsoft\ User\ Data $nethomedir/Documents/Microsoft\ User\ Data

fi