Chapter 7. Printing Services

Modern printers usually fall into two categories: inexpensive local printers that require a host computer, and more expensive stand-alone shared network printers. For many, sharing fewer high-end printers is a better solution than using individual inexpensive printers. Although they're more expensive, shared network printers are often economically more efficient from a cost-per-page standpoint and are usually technically superior as well, yielding faster and better prints. However, when shared-printer demand increases beyond capacity, resource contention among your users may cause problems. Thus, many administrators resort to print servers that monitor printer traffic and manage printer resources.

Mac OS X Server can be configured to provide such a printing service. Essentially, your server can act as an intermediary between your users and the printers. Print jobs are sent to your server, where they're placed in a queue; then, depending on their configuration, they're sent to the printer, put on hold, or denied. As the server administrator, you can configure how print jobs are handled. You can manually adjust print jobs, or you can define user print quotas that instruct the server to automatically disable a user's ability to print after their allowance is used up.

The print server also lets you share non-network printers and reshare network printers using different printing protocols. Specifically, you can create and share a print queue for any printer that Mac OS X can print to. This includes both raster and postscript printers available to your server via AppleTalk, Windows (SMB), LPR, IPP, HTTP, Rendezvous, Bluetooth, USB, and FireWire. Furthermore, Mac OS X Server can share any of its printer queues via AppleTalk, Windows (SMB), and LPR (with Rendezvous) network printing protocols.