Disabling the Xerox ColorQube print banner

I had a call come in today asking to have the print banner for our Xerox ColorQube turned off. We don’t normally have that option enabled, so I took a look and found something that annoyed me greatly. The print banner in the Mac’s print settings was disabled, as it should have been, but there was a second banner option buried deep down in the Advanced section in the Xerox-specific settings. That login banner option was enabled by default.

In the event anyone has a similar annoyance, here’s how you can turn it off:

1. Log in as any user at your workstation.

2. Log into the local CUPS web interface: http://localhost:631

3. Select your Xerox ColorQube’s print queue

4. Select Set Default Options

5. Select Advanced

6. Set XRBannerSheet to Off

7. Click the Set Default Options at the bottom of the page.

You then need to authenticate with the local administrator account’s username and password. After that, the Xerox banner option will be turned off by default in your ColorQube’s print queue on your workstation.

Update – 5-6-2011:

I had one person ask how to send this silently on the command-line, so that it could be scripted or sent to multiple machines at the same time. Here’s the lpdadmin commands you’ll need to send:

To identify the CUPS print queue for the Xerox ColorQube printer on the workstation, run the following command:

lpstat -v | awk '{sub(/\:/,"",$3); print $3}'

You should see a printer name that references either the printer’s name or IP address. Use this in place of print_queue_name in the commands below.

To disable: sudo lpadmin -p print_queue_name -o XRBannerSheet=None

To re-enable, sudo lpadmin -p print_queue_name -o XRBannerSheet=AtStart

You can also edit and take the PPD for this printer from /etc/cups/ppd and use it on a print server (or as part of your image), so that everyone who gets their PPD from that print server will automatically get those options set for that print queue.