Remote Printing
Monday, 16 April 2007
This is an odd one. The remote site in Dallas need to be able to print remotely from terminal services. The catch is they are each running a software based VPN client rather than my recommendation of a small VPN hardware box such as the Sonicwall TZ-170.
The way I approached this is to find a printer they have access to, in this case a HP Laserjet 1320 and capture it on LPT2. I then re-created the printer on LPT2 and allowed it to propagate into Terminal Services as as TS00x: connection.
I then created a printer in Terminal Services and mapped it to this TS00x: connection. So, when a user prints it gets redirected, then redirected. How about that?
It’s not the best solution I’ll grant you but it works. Ideally they need a hardware VPN but if I could get hold of their admin account details for their Internet router I might be able to configure Internet printing. They are working on it at the moment but getting info like that is highly unlikely … or at least it should be.

Jason Slater is an independent technologist and blogger.