Monthly Archives: March 2012

Give Standard Users the Ability to Manage Print Queues and Printers in MAC OS X 10.6

I ran into a problem the other day where the standard user accounts we have on our Apple lab computers were unable to resume the printer queues on the computers. Any time the printer queue would pause, we’d have to go and resume it with an account that has administrator permissions. Here is how I resolved this so that the standard users could resume printers and manage print queues.

First, if you’ve messed around with the cups.conf file already, set it to default CUPS config file by performing the following:

  1. Click on Go menu, Click on Go To Folder…, enter: /private/etc/cups
  2. Copy cupsd.conf.default to the desktop, rename it to cupsd.conf
  3. copy it back to /private/etc/cups, overwriting the original file.

Next Obtain user information for the standard account that needs the permission:

  1. Open System Preferences, and then go into “Accounts”
  2. Unlock the preference pane at the bottom and then right click on the user account that needs access. Click “Advanced Options…”
  3. Record the users case sensitive Account Name and the User’s ID.

Now it’s time to Make the change:

  1. Open Terminal
  2. Enter the following commands:
  3. sudo dscl . -append /Groups/lpadmin GroupMembership <User ID>
  4. and
  5. sudo dscl . -append /Groups/lpadmin GroupMembership <Account Name>
  6. Afterwards run this command to verify that both are listed in the group:
  7. dscl . -read /Groups/lpadmin

Log out and log back in as the user and verify that they can now manage print jobs, and pause and resume printers.