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A teacher at one of the schools I work for asked if, instead of having students send them files that are to be printed off in colour -- given that students aren't allowed to use the colour printer but staff can -- would it be possible to add the colour printer on the student's laptops, but require the teacher to authenticate for every print job.

Having done some googling, it isn't obviously possible, but it isn't clear that it is impossible, either. The computers in question are running Mac OS X 10.5, which uses CUPS.

Clinton Blackmore
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2 Answers2

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Is this network printer or is it shared from a particular machine?

In the past I've done this by having a machine act as the print server (which may even be the teacher's workstation), then set CUPS to hold jobs indefinitely so that they can be manually released.

I've done this on Linux rather than OS X, but there, I just added Option job-hold-until indefinite to the printer.conf file, similar to some of the methods discussed here.

phoebus
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One solution is to buy "enterprise"/departmental printers that can be managed centrally. I've been to places where color printing requires a pin, black and white does not.

duffbeer703
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