Friday, May 12, 2006

Today's broken user interface award...

...goes to printing on OS X Server. You'll notice that you can add or remove printers via Server Admin: however, if you do add one via that route then the system will try and get the printer to emit its PPD at it. If the printer doesn't do this, then it's a "Generic Postscript Printer" and there's no way to change that.


Unless, of course, you log in at the console (Xserves make that so easy and snappy to achieve) and use the same Printer Setup Utility you'd otherwise have used on the client OS. You can then go back into Server Admin to set up whether a queue is quotad, set up sharing and so on.


Great, so far we've used two apps to configure our printer. Let's just add a third (although this does make sense), because you now have to go into workgroup manager to set up the per-user quotas for the print queues. Fine, and while we're here we'll use managed config to define which printers appear in which print panels. Only, we can't. Shared printers can't be added to the MCX print menus...even if they appear in my print menu.


This is so confusing it's almost fun...

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