setting up printing to a computer with a vpn

[perrychilds]

In my attempt to become more knowledgeable about the industry that I work in, I was presented with a scenario that I did not know the answer to. If you have a computer (we will call it A1) which shares a VPN with a computer offsite (we will call it B2). Do you need to install print drivers in both computers? Moreover, to add a little complexity to this scenario, what if you want to scan locally to computer A1, does the VPN affect that? we sell mostly sharp products here, so I would probably be using sharpdesk to set up the scan

[copymech]

Re: setting up printing to a computer with a vpn

oh boy, i spent sveral hours trying to print from a vpn. i ended up sharing a driver on the main network and pointing the vpn computer at it. it only works if the host computer is turned on of course.

[perrychilds]

Re: setting up printing to a computer with a vpn

oh boy, i spent sveral hours trying to print from a vpn. i ended up sharing a driver on the main network and pointing the vpn computer at it. it only works if the host computer is turned on of course.

I figured it would be a big headache

[TheOwl]

Re: setting up printing to a computer with a vpn

Now when you say a computer that shares a VPN connection with an offsite computer, do you mean that the two computers are using a direct link to one another or are you using a VPN from a router / server?

When creating a VPN connection, this places a remote computer within a network as though the computer is connected to a switch along with the other computers within that network. You will find that when the remote computer is connected, it will have an IP address which is the same as other PC's which are internal of the network.

This also means that printing to a device is extremely easy, but a bit slower as traffic is going across the internet instead of through the intranet.

If you have a server and a domain setup, then this becomes even easier as the server will host the print driver and once the VPN connection is made, the remote computer will then show that the printer is avaiable with the print queue that points at the server.

Things get a little bit harder if you are trying to setup a remote computer which uses a networked printer with a VPN into your network as come VPN providers (say like the CISCO VPN Client) actually cut you off from your local network once the VPN is up to try and stop other devices on the network also talking to the network which the VPN connection is made to.