How to Resume a Paused Network Printer with non-Admin credentials?

Question

There are two Mac labs, each with network printers that can receive jobs from either lab (or anywhere really).

Quite often, when attempting to print a document, the Macs get a printer has been paused error dialog much like the following:

Clicking resume does the trick, however that action requires administrator credentials.

The lab assistants have non-admin credentials, and an administrator may not be around.

Is there any sort of account that can be setup to manage printers, like the Print Operators group in Windows?

Solution

Yes, the _lpoperator group. You can add individual users to it:

sudo dseditgroup -o edit -a usernametoadd -t user _lpoperator

Or grant operator rights to everyone in another group by making it a nested subgroup:

sudo dseditgroup -o edit -a labadmins -t group _lpoperator

If you wanted to grant operator rights to everyone with a regular account, use the "staff" group; there's also an "everyone" group, which includes not-so-regular accounts (e.g. guests) as well.

BTW, there's also an _lpadmin group, which grants operator rights, plus things like the ability to create & delete print queues.

Comments

[Gordon Davisson]

@Louis: yes, -a (add membership) instead of -d (delete membership); thanks for editing. I was testing to make sure I had the syntax right, and of course I copied&pasted the wrong line...