Bulk Install HP 8720 on Macintosh using Mosyle MDM

[Davepix]

I am managing 90 Macbooks using Mosyle Manager MDM or currently putting them into management I should say.

Our 20 HP 8720s have blossomed on occasion to 50 with printer sharing and strange things happening on the network aside from unreliable printing. 

As a starting point, I am going to wipe out everyone's print que's and printer list and wish to reinstall printers properly so they are just shared on our network using preferrably the HP drivers over Airprint unless suggested otherwise. 

Though I can capture the printers with the MDM software and distribute them, I can't be sure they are putting in the drivers properly and would prefer a more controlled install though I can't run HP Easystart on every machine and add all the printers without manually doing it. Is there a PKG out there that I can use to install the drivers and point the MDM to them when it installs the printer so I get the HP drivers and don't have Easy start on all the computers.

[ShlomiL]

Hi,

Please use HP Easy Admin for that purpose, which allows obtaining a package of the HP Essential Software and the HP Easy Scan software:

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c06164609

Shlomi

[Davepix]

Thanks for your quick reply, I'm downloading now and will do a test install hopefully within the hour.

I'm assuming that I'll be intalling a PKG on everyone's machine and directing each printer that I install to use the appropriate driver which will be located in the Library-Printers-... wait, just looked and 

We also have a few miscellaneous HP's in the office for which I assume I'll need to do a PKG for each of them as well? It appears that even though I created the PKG for the 8720, a whole lot of ppd.gz files were installed in addition.

[IronBadger]

In your scenario it might be easiest to just set up the print queues with AirPrint.  The 8720 is AirPrint capable and AirPrint will provide the majority of the features.  This way you don't need to worry about driver distribution or upkeep.

Just a thought.

[Davepix]

Schlomi,

Since I have gone down this route... I'm just deploying my first test and won't get to the printer until the morning. 

Question for you. HP Easy Admin gives me three PKG's, 

hp-printer-essentials-H-5_10_5

hp-easy-scan-1_9_2

hp-printer-help-OJ8720-1_0_0

The fist one obviously installs the drivers. My MDM will install one PKG with the printer. Assuming easyscan and help should also be installed, I can just push them out separately from the MDM install for the print drivers. 

Question is, can you think of any reason they may not work as they will be installed separately? I guess it wouldn't matter as if they had to go in at the same time they would all be in one PKG.

[ShlomiL]

Generally, any package is installed individually once downloaded from HP Easy Admin regardless of the MDM usage, so I cannot think of any such reason.

Where you able to install the HP Easy Scan application? does it return any specific error?

As long as it is an error related to the HP installation I would be able to help, but not likely with any error returned by the used MDM software.

Shlomi

[Davepix]

I attempted an MDM install of a Bonjour printer, there are two methods of creating the profile/install. I did the easy one, I installed a printer on my local machine to use Airprint, captured the printer install to the MDM and distributed it.

The printer installed on the remote machine as Generic with no scan option rather than Airprint.

The second method of install, I name a printer, give the bonjour address dnssd:// and specify a driver or not. If I don't have a driver installed or specified it won't install and in the case of airprint, where would the driver be installed to point to? I would assume as you don't install an airprint driver I can't point nor install which leaves me with installing generic or going with the other method which we were talking about in the previous response from Schlomi

[Davepix]

I haven't yet messed with the easyscan installation. When I install the PKG  I get the following error. When I did a clean install I reacall also having apple sercurity and privacy prefs block the installer even though I was running it with MDM. I am running OSX 10.14

[IronBadger · Accepted solution]

In macOS 10.14 you can not install kext files without them being allowed at the device.  In order to install remotely you need to white list them first.

Here is a JAMF forum post that goes into it a bit.

https://www.jamf.com/jamf-nation/discussions/26863/macos-kext-whitelisting-teamid-bundle-id-using-a-...

You should probably reach out to your MDM support community.

As for HP Easy Scan...it is actually also available on the Mac app store.  So end users could go get it and install it if they wanted it rather than you pushing it.  But pushing it should be easy as it is not a driver.  It is a stand alone app.

[Davepix]

Whitelisting though sounding intimidating was not hard to do with the MDM, the install is halfway through our assets now and working well.

Question for you, not sure which driver this was but with a regular desktop install, you would see "Scan" as an option when you looked at a printer in  Printers & Scanners, I think that must be the airprint driver. I had wanted to test installation using the airprint driver not knowing which would print better/faster require less maintenance. Above, someone had suggested using it but I couldn't see a way to force installation using the airprint drivers. Is it airprint that gives you scan in the sys pref, likely I'll have to circle back with Mosyle to ask the question of how to force the driver preference.