We have a network-wide CUPS server that offers authenticated printer access to all our campus users. We've been pretty disappointed with the way Mac clients handle bad printing authentication, though. In any other authentication dialog, when a user types in a bad username or password, the window shakes briefly, allowing the user to re-enter.

With printers, this isn't the case. It'll happily accept (and even save to the keychain, if specified) bad credentials. The authentication dialog is dismissed, and the user then has to deal with the print jobs showing up as 'On hold (authentication required)'. To get their job printed, they need to select it in the printer's queue, click 'Resume', then re-enter appropriate credentials. Is there a way to get failed printing authentication to work more intuitively for Mac OS X clients?

We're trying to support a BYOD environment, but our end users have been really confused by this. It's made even worse by the way it pre-populates the user's full login name (e.g. 'Smith, John'), which tends to make them think to use their local machine passwords. @gravyface Server-side, we see repeated failed authentication attempts (about once each second) from any machine sitting in the limbo of 'bad credentials accepted' and 'On hold (authentication required)'. From the logs, I can see their IP address, but that's about it.

I understand we can't expect everything to work cleanly and intuitively with BYOD, but in this case it really seems like if authentication failure worked like it does in other areas of OS X (prompts user again), that'd be acceptable. – Sep 5 '12 at 3:17. I don't know of a way to get the Mac to behave/respond differently natively, but you may have better luck writing a printer setup script that uses lpadmin where you can specify the printer/printer path as well as credentials. You could attempt to authenticate with lpadmin (and -o auth-info-required=username,password); not sure if there's any feedback to stdout when that commands executed though, and it also has to be run with sudo. You can disable the pre-population (in OS X 10.5+ I believe) with: defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.NetworkAuthorization UseShortName -bool YES defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.NetworkAuthorization UseDefaultName -bool NO This alone may reduce the number of incorrect authentication attempts along with clear documentation on what credentials to use (I usually phrase it like, 'use the same network username and password you use on your Windows computer at the office').

Fix Mac Shared Windows Printer “hold for authentication” Authenticate using your Windows login through the OSX print queue app. When your print effort fails on the Mac, be sure to click the swirly icon to the right, next to the print job. Configuring the Printer Driver for User Authentication. Use the following procedure to register a user's authentication information in the printer driver. On the [Start] menu, click [Control Panel], and then click [Printers and Faxes] in the [Printers and Other Hardware] category.

Say you want to use some printers via IPP, but these require authentication with a user account. You could use which was published a few days ago, and install the printer directly using an address like this: ipp://account:password@server/printer You could also do this in Tiger by holding the Option key while pressing Add. However, there are two fundamental problems with this approach. First, these printers can be used by every user on the machine, so adding printers like this only makes sense on single-user machines. Second, the account data is written to /etc/cups/printers.conf, i.e. Ibm spss free trial for mac. This file contains your password in clear text (this file is only readable by administrators, though). Fortunately, OS X 10.5 actually supports IPP printing with authentication, but Apple somehow managed to obfuscate this feature.