How to Allow Non-Admin Users to Add Printers in Leopard

With Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), Apple added a new feature: non-admin users are no longer able to add printers without an administrator password. This has been true of Windows for quite awhile and I’m sure it’s much needed in some environments, but it would result in a lot of trouble for me. A lot of teachers at my school have their own printers at their homes and they’d like to be able to print to them with their laptops. I would like an easy way to let them do that.

So Friday I spent a lot of time searching on the internet for a way to do exactly that. It wasn’t easy. I found a lot of methods that didn’t work and a lot more that didn’t give me enough information with which I could figure out how to do it. By splicing together information from two sources, I figured out how to make it work. Here’s how to do it.

1. First you need to be logged in as an administrative user. Open Firefox and go to http://localhost:631/admin, click on “Edit Configuration File”. 

2. You’re going to look for these two parts towards the bottom:

#  <Limit CUPS-Add-Modify-Printer CUPS-Delete-Printer CUPS-Add-Modify-Class CUPS-Delete-Class CUPS-Set-Default>
#    AuthType Default
#    Require user @SYSTEM
#    Order deny,allow
#  </Limit>
#  <Limit Pause-Printer Resume-Printer Enable-Printer Disable-Printer 
#  Pause-Printer-After-Current-Job Hold-New-Jobs Release-Held-New-Jobs
#  Deactivate-Printer Activate-Printer Restart-Printer Shutdown-Printer
#  Startup-Printer Promote-Job Schedule-Job-After CUPS-Accept-Jobs CUPS-Reject-Jobs>
#    AuthType Default
#    Require user @AUTHKEY(system.print.admin) @admin @lpadmin
#    Order deny,allow
#  </Limit>

3. Select them and press the delete key. Click “Save Changes.”

4. Restart your computer.

From now on, any user will be able to add any printer they want.

August 17, 2008 · Filed under Apple

10 Comments »

  1. links for 2008-08-31 « The View From My Window Said,

    August 31, 2008 @ 3:04 pm

    [...] Looking Forward » How to Allow Non-Admin Users to Add Printers in Leopard (tags: osx tools) [...]

  2. links for 2008-10-08 | digital guerrilla Said,

    October 8, 2008 @ 6:01 pm

    [...] Looking Forward » How to Allow Non-Admin Users to Add Printers in Leopard (tags: printing osx howto work) [...]

  3. nicolas darqué Said,

    January 28, 2009 @ 3:16 am

    Thank you !!

  4. MLC Said,

    February 17, 2009 @ 4:12 pm

    This WORKED. Thank you. I run several labs at a school and this problem was driving everyone nuts. I tried following some other articles’ suggestions for editing the cupsd.conf file, and they either didn’t do the job or completely broke the CUPS service so that users couldn’t login to their accounts. I changed it as you suggested, except I didn’t delete the part prohibiting users from adding and deleting privileges. Helpful in a lab setting.

  5. John Said,

    February 26, 2009 @ 4:13 pm

    Great find! it seem a little bit odd but my config was a lot different then the one posted. my 10.5.6 has updated it or something. anyways….

    now that I have it done I can only add printers using

    /System/Library/Core Services/Addprinter

    is that all or is their away to get the printer control panel function working?

  6. Jeff Said,

    March 17, 2009 @ 1:57 pm

    I cannot get this to work. I’ve tried many variations and nothing.

    There are more options listed here, but still no luck.
    http://blog.macadmincorner.com/allow-non-admin-users-to-manage-printers/comment-page-1/#comment-338

  7. Norton Said,

    May 19, 2009 @ 9:59 pm

    Thanks for the tip (got it via macoxhints.com). Instead of deleting the lines, I added # in front to turn them into comments.

  8. Hadrian Said,

    June 8, 2009 @ 3:44 pm

    Excellent tip. Searched quite a few non descript ‘advice’ postings on the web to no avail. This one worked first time. Excellent!

  9. Jason Said,

    September 27, 2009 @ 8:28 pm

    If you want finer-grained control over the add printer function, then rather than deleting these sections you could instead just add “@lpadmin” to the end of the first “Require” line (it’s already at the end of the second one). Then, to grant a user permissions to administer printers, just add them to the “lpadmin” group.

    Supposedly in 10.5, local and mobile users are already part of this group by default, so you may only need to make the change to the cupsd.conf file and not need to do anything with the users.

  10. M. Carlson Said,

    October 8, 2009 @ 11:37 am

    @Jason: It appears the machete is superior to the scalpel here.

    According to
    http://www.jaharmi.com/2009/02/21/membership_in_the_lpadmin_group_on_mac_os_x_leopard
    both network and mobile users are not members of lpadmin.

    According to
    http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3511
    one can add these user types to lpadmin, but the commands given do not result in what the description says should happen. Mostly, there’s no directory called /Local and instead of being prompted for the local account holder’s password, I am promoted for the ‘user’ indicated toward the end of the line for adding mobile users.

    I’m going to try this CUPS config mod with the hope that my several dozens of mobile account Mac users can add their own printers.

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