One of the wonderful technicians from Toucan came and upgraded our Mac Mini server to OSX 10.7 Lion on Monday. It went pretty well, with only a bit of a glitch with the Snow Leopard machines needing to be rebound. We tried setting up a script to this automatically, but this only worked on about half the machines so I still had to go around and make sure people could log on properly.
However, I also discovered that this had pretty much broken the previous fix for the Ricoh printer/copier, resulting in the copier spewing out reams and reams of gibberish. This was compounded by the fact that it is report-writing season, which requires much printing at the best of times. Not good.
The problem boiled down to printer driver issues, more specifically that not all the Macs had the same Gutenprint drivers installed and so defaulted to the generic driver instead of the correct one. Fun.
The solution was as follows:
- Make sure all the macs had the latest Gutenprint installed, as this is the driver Workgroup Manager was instructing Macs to use. Apple Remote Desktop made this easy.
- Log onto each Mac remotely and do a test print, checking if the correct driver was being used.
- If the wrong driver was being used, I then had to log in as an administrator and reset the print system, forcing the Mac to use the driver instructed by MCX. To do this, you open ‘Print & Scan’ in System Preferences, right click on the list of printers and then select ‘Reset printing system…’.
- Log in again as a managed network account and check it works.
I’m sure if I was a scripting kinda guy, there could be an easier way to do this. But it did work, albeit rather long-windedly.
The moral of the story? Make sure your Ricoh printer come with a Postscript driver card installed!
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