Mac OS X Lion Server For Dummies®

Managing Printers and Print Jobs

With multiple printers shared on the network, you can use either Server Preferences or the CUPS web interface to manage print jobs and printers. Print pools (classes) are treated exactly like printers. The next few sections describe some of these activities.

Using System Preferences to manage printers and jobs

Designating a printer to share automatically creates a print queue on the Mac you're configuring. This is true even for network printers. The queue stores users' documents waiting to be printed and feeds them to the printer when ready.

You can see a list of the print jobs and users in the Print & Scan pane of System Preferences (refer to Figure 10-5). Select a printer or a printer class on the left and click the Open Print Queue button. Here, you can hold or delete print jobs, see a printer status message (such as Paused or Out of Paper), and view the print queue's log file.

After you click the Open Print Queue button for a selected printer or class, you also see some additional menus in the menu bar at the top of the screen. For example, the Completed Jobs item in the Jobs menu displays a list of printed jobs.

One of the most interesting tasks is moving print jobs between printers. If a print job can't wait for the queue it's in, you can move it to another printer by simply dragging and dropping it. Here's how:

1. Open System Preferences and ...