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I want a bit help with printer sharing on mac network. It is not working fine. I am not so good in configuration of mac network. I thought this would be simple and can be done through simple steps. But it is not working. I am unable to get the exact steps through which I can simply manage printer. I need some way through which I can enable and disable the same as per my need. Like turning it on/off whenever is needed. But I am not able to find the settings.
Once the printer is shared it is going to work. To turn that off you have to disable the sharing back again. It is quiet easy to do the same. For that you have to go in apple menu and then you have to click System Preferences. Click on the Print & Scan. Here you can find the share button at the left side. You just have to click on that and once done you have to remove the tick and unshare it. There is no automatic way of doing the same.
It is easy to setup a printer. But you said you want to turn it off when not required. You have to do that manually. You can't disable or enable setting each time. This will be a long process. If you don't want anyone to access your printer then you can switch it off. That will do the job. There are few ip based printers which are much more easier to use. Because here you can access the control panel through a ip address and you can configure the settings.
There are ample of multifunctional printers that comes with web based access. You can disable the file sharing through that. But it is right that it is a long process. Still if you want to do that then you have to buy a high end model. That comes with advance network settings. Then only it is going to work. You can disable the sharing settings through your tablet or mobile phone by accessing the web panel. That will be easy for you to manage.
In Windows you have option to do that. You can do that through group policy settings. It is not a very complicated task. You just have to create a policy and you can set that on the basis of time. From this time to this time the printer is available for specific users. And once the time has crossed the printer wont work. But in Mac I a not quiet sure about using gpo thing. It might not having the same. You can try looking for similar application.
Mac has very few printer manager software. For windows there are ample of them. I can find some easy tools that you can use to control the printer access. Most of the tools which I found are simply based on configuring printer properties. But there is one application you can test. Just checkout papercut. This app is quiet nice to manage the printer and you can configure the settings as per your need. But I am not quiet sure about managing the user access.