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sharing a printer over the internet

N

nerdcore

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 7, 2003
Messages
423
A client of mine wants to be able to print from a local database, to a printer which is located across the internet connected to another computer. Equipment cost must be minimal. I have googled this and I'm only coming up with proprietary software or local IP printing, but haven't found a good explanation of how to do this or if it's even possible (given budget constraints).

The network on which the printer resides is behind a Linksys router. There are currently 2 printers, one minolta printer with ethernet builtin, and one HP printer that is connected to an XP Pro machine and is shared out.

Is there a way to access these printer across the internet from the corporate office? I have found that ports 631, 515, and 9100 may need to be opened but have no solid answer on these. Also how would i even add the printer in Windows? As a network printer? or a local TCP/IP port? I've tried it a few different ways with no luck. Hopefully someone has done this and can shed some light. Thanks!
 
Best application for this is a VPN. What kind of hardware and software are you looking at in terms of servers? If you're using any kind of linux solution, smoothwall would do the job for VPN service, I think. Windows 2000 Server also supports VPN, I'm told, though I've never set it up or dealt with it.

What's wrong with a fax? Or get Adobe Acrobat Pro and print directly to PDF, then email the PDF to the other site. Both sound like less work and much less hassle.
 
They need to print out invoices on double copy carbon invoice paper with a dot matrix printer. the program here is built to print in the correct spots on the invoices, and the people on the other end are plumbers, who have zero computer experience...i know them personally, and trust me, they couldn't handle opening and printing a PDF. great plumbers, terrible computer users :eek: . there will be noone at the machine on the other end. They just want to walk up to a printer every day and take the invoices so they know where to go for the day. The computer prob wont even have a monitor (to avoid them messing with it).

on their end I am looking at not having any servers, just an XP pro machine that will act as a print server...

On my end (the corporate office) I have a Sonicwall Soho with VPN. I am tempted to use the Smoothwall option on the other end (I use smoothwall at home and like it), but may just go for a VPN Linksys for hardware reliability. Only spare machines around here are about 10 years old and i don't trust them to survive.

you don't happen to know if linksys will hold a VPN connection over a dynamic ip address? :D

EDIT: I've gotten to the point of getting a document in the print que but it just errors out on printing...i setup IIS on the XP Pro machine on the client end, and you can browse and connect to the printers thru http://serveraddress/printers . This actually sets up the remote printer locally but every page i print just errors out after a few mins... VPN is looking better every minute.

Thanks for the help, I'm off to my next client, will check this in a few hours.

EDIT 2: I should note that the above testing I am doing is to my home network, the actual client site is not setup yet. My home network is behind a linksys router with port 80 open to the IIS/print server box.
 
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