Mac OS X printing to CUPS - More intuitive authentication failure?

Solution 1:

I don't know of a way to get the Mac to behave/respond differently natively, but you may have better luck writing a printer setup script that uses lpadmin where you can specify the printer/printer path as well as credentials. You could attempt to authenticate with lpadmin (and -o auth-info-required=username,password); not sure if there's any feedback to stdout when that commands executed though, and it also has to be run with sudo.

You can disable the pre-population (in OS X 10.5+ I believe) with:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.NetworkAuthorization UseShortName -bool YES

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.NetworkAuthorization UseDefaultName -bool NO

This alone may reduce the number of incorrect authentication attempts along with clear documentation on what credentials to use (I usually phrase it like, "use the same network username and password you use on your Windows computer at the office").