SMB printer authentication by domain credentials

Question

On our network, the Macs are set up to authenticate with Active Directory. Our printers are accessible through SMB shares from our Windows print server. Our help desk recently brought up an issue with this, though.
When users first try to print to a printer, they are shown a prompt asking for their username and password (http://imgur.com/j6fp7). Mac OS X fills in their pretty username ("John Smith") instead of their domain username ("smith"). Users assume this is correct, try to authenticate, and then call the help desk when the printer doesn't print their stuff.
As we've learned, the correct format for authentication is "DOMAIN\username", but since it's unintuitive, it almost always leads to a help desk call. Even worse, because the authentication isn't visibly rejected (the printer just won't print), the keychain will now store the user's incorrect credentials, leading to even more confusion. When you pile on our 270-day mandatory password reset policy, now the users' keychains have multiple sets of invalid credentials for the same printer, and they're calling back every several months about the same issue.
There are several ways to approach this, but I'm not sure which would be best. I've been trying to Google up a solution, but no luck. Is there any way to get Mac OS X to show the prompt with the domain field instead (http://students.jccc.edu/documents/images/osx-smb_login.jpg)?

Answer 1

Hello and welcome to Apple Discussions.
I don't have a solution but a suggested workaround. Instead of using SMB to connect to the Windows shared printers, you could enable Unix Print Services on the Windows print server and then use LPR for the Mac print queues. This avoids the need for the Mac users to authenticate when printing.
With the Mac client the LPR queue would consist of entering the Windows server name or IP address for the host name and the Windows printer share name for the LPR queue.