Remote Printing

[skb2005]

We have 2 locations (City-A and City-B). Both the locations are connected to internet but not connected to each other. In other words, there is no VPN and there is no possibility of having VPN.

The requirement: City-A wants to print on the printer connected to a computer in City-B.

Please help.

 

[DelJo63]

Windows CUPS printing

One technique is call CUPS (Common Unix Printing System)

This article describes same.

The target system (the one with the printer) needs port forwarding of port 631 to the lan system with the printer.

Client: Windows

** NOTE: If using Windows ME or earlier you might need Windows patches for IPP printing. The ME one is here **

To add your IPP printer, first get into the "Add a Printer" wizard. It's accessible by:
Start > Control Panel > Printers and Faxes > Add a new Printer

Now that you're in the Wizard, click "Next". It will ask if you're adding a local or networked printer - Select Networked.

Enter your address as:

http://linux_hostname_or_ip:631/printers/linux_host_queue_name

When it asks for a driver, select the "Generic" category and then as a printer model select the "MS Publisher Imagesetter" printer.

Finish the wizard, and now you should be able to print via the IPP printing.

Print sharing can be made to operate across the WAN, but that is a security risk
for your File Shares. CUPS would not expose Print/File sharing (ports 139,445)

 

[skb2005]

Thanks for the reply.

I forgot to mention that we have windows environment. We are using Windows XP Home Edition.

 

[DelJo63]

Any old pc lying about could be loaded with a trivial linux for this support.

However, if you open port 631 on a firewall and port forward from the router to it,
it just might work on XP -- no harm, no foul -- just Print Share a device

 

[Nodsu]

A silly question.. Why would you want to print to a remote location? How would one handle "out of paper" or "out of toner" errors or paper jams?

Are you sure you don't want to e-mail the document over? Afterwards print it locally or use fax if you really have to kill trees..

 

[tipstir]

We have 2 locations (City-A and City-B). Both the locations are connected to internet but not connected to each other. In other words, there is no VPN and there is no possibility of having VPN.

The requirement: City-A wants to print on the printer connected to a computer in City-B.

Please help.

Open a remote session into the other PC you want to connect over the internet. Either wired connection or wireless connection.

Choices to do this are:

Ultra VNC your City A would be the Host and City B would be the Remote
Someone in City B would have to install the software and someone in City A would have to do the same and test it out. You would also need Java Client on both systems. Setup permissions in the software, user login and password. Router remote on both systems need to be open an assign IP. If you don't have domain on either PC you would have to create IP-web address like: business_b_computer.net
http://www.dyndns.org or http://www.no-ip.com/ takes your current ISP IP address you're assigned by your ISP and makes it into a dummy address which is basically your ISP IP adress as shown in below example.

http://business_b_computer.net:8080

This is what you would type in the on your browser URL path..

I've done this many times also ship to mainland over wireless and it works. So what you want to do would work. You can remote in run Word type docs and print them out. You can transfer files to be printed out also.

If you really want to do this seriously you should get Radmin it's not for free but it doesn't need Java Client and it's very stable. I use it daily to remote into systems.
Setup is pretty straight forward.

 

[DelJo63]

variation on the email docs for remote printing.

To preserve output formatting from ANY program
(ie the remote doesn't have to have the same program installed),
you could use this scenario;

1. open document
2. print to PDF (using PDF995 print driver)
3. attach pdf document to email and send
4. remote user safely opens + prints x copies