If you see this message when printing with Mobility Print This message can appear when printing from MacOS to print queues published with PaperCut Mobility Print if the user enters the wrong username or password. Pressing the refresh button gives the user a chance to reenter their credentials and, if the problem was due to an incorrect username or password, the job should go through with the correct credentials. The message can also appear if the Mobility print queue has enabled and the user has previously saved their credentials for printing in the Keychain. With credentials stored in the Keychain, the prompt for authentication won’t pop up, but if opened, the print queue window shows “Hold for authentication.” While annoying, this does prevent the more significant problem of a user accidentally saving their PaperCut credentials on a shared device.
Disabling Per-Job authentication in Mobility Print prevents the above scenario, but won’t be practical if your users share devices and you want to prompt for credentials with each Mobility Print job. Alternatively, you open Keychain to delete the credentials in question, then cancel the job and retry.
A rogue Mobility server The pickle in this case is that if a user has connected to a print queue from the Primary server and also somehow installed PaperCut and Mobility on their computer, then anyone in the office that sends jobs to this queue receives “Hold for Authentication” on their macOS device or incorrect name or password on their iOS device. For example, ABC Co. Has a Mobility print server that publishes printers to Alice, Bob, and Chuck. At one point, for whatever reason, Chuck installed PaperCut and Mobility on his computer and promptly forgot about it.
Remember that by default Chuck’s rogue Mobility server publishes print queues with mDNS. In any case, the real ABC Co. Mobility server is finally publishing queues, and Chuck adds one of its printers, ABC-Printer. Alice and Bob connect to ABC-Printer, but they get hold for authentication because of the colliding mDNS advertisements from multiple Mobility servers. However, Alice and Bob can print to the queue as long as Chuck takes his laptop to work from home. Also, the ABC Co Mobility server publishes another queue, ABC-Printer-BW, but luckily, Chuck never prints in black and white so he didn’t connect this printer to his rogue Mobility server which means everyone can print to it successfully.
However, there may be times when in attempting to print to such printers, you see your print job spool to the device, but it then sits in your print queue with a small message that states something about the job being on hold with authentication required. When working in a PC and MAC mixed invironment, there is an increasing need to print from a Windows connected Printer from a MAC. This article gives the basic steps of setting up the PC, sharing the printer on the network and then connecting to the printer from the MAC.
An apostrophe in the username The apostrophe shortcoming is inherent to macOS whether the user authenticates with their apostrophe-enabled username on a print queue advertised from Mobility or a print queue published directly from an AirPrint-enabled printer. At the time of this writing, we have yet to determine whether this lapse is due to CUPS, macOS, both, or something else entirely. At any rate, a short-term workaround is to hit the print job’s refresh icon to input one’s credentials a second time, as, for some reason, the second authentication attempt sends the job through.
Keep in mind every print job would require this workaround. However, a longer-term workaround is to leverage PaperCut’s feature. Turn on username aliasing under Options Advanced Username Aliasing. Next, go to your apostrophe-enabled user and populate their username alias with a name that doesn’t include an apostrophe.
As you can imagine, leveraging username aliasing comes with the condition that users with apostrophe-enabled usernames require training to authenticate with the new alias when sending jobs to Mobility print queues. If you see this message without Mobility Print This message is often wholly unrelated to PaperCut but may show up when customers start implementing shared print queues on servers. Usually, if you see this error, it is about the print queue’s OS-level authentication instead of PaperCut. For this reason, we find it’s easiest to remove PaperCut from the equation when testing.
Ignore the printer in PaperCut using the steps. Confirm printer ignoring works by sending a job to the queue from the server itself to make sure it doesn’t show up in PaperCut under Logs → Job Log. Keep in mind that one has to send the job to the server’s shared print queue as printing directly from a workstation to the printer bypasses the server print queue entirely (and also PaperCut) so is not a real test of potential issues with the server queue. Confirm correct setup of the print queue connection. For organizations with small numbers of macOS clients, an easy to manage connection protocol for Windows hosted print queues is. If users have authentication issues with an SMB-connected print queue, make sure that they are using their current username and password. Sometimes, users are unaware that their password expired or are unaware that their SMB username changed after changing their surname with HR, payroll, or AD, for example.
However, rather than training users on adding a print queue using the SMB protocol, keep in mind that they can also add Windows hosted queues with the ‘Windows’ tab as per. With SMB-connected queues, it may also be worth using the printer’s fully qualified domain name as detailed in. As a troubleshooting step with Mac-hosted print queues, check to see whether authentication behaves any differently using the protocol instead of Bonjour. Make sure that there aren’t any spaces or special characters in the printer name. That is to say; our recommendation is only to use alpha-numeric (numbers and letters) characters when naming your server print queues.