Anyone tried to Print over Internet (Win2k) ?

[BPoller]

Hi,

we have 3 Win2k-Clients at home, which i want to be able to print on my printer in the office via internet. Office- and home-router are DSL-WLAN-Router (AVM FritzBox 7050).

Printer is Lexmark Optra S 1650N Network-printer

I have seen some Infos in the web, that this must be possible, but didnt found a good how-to.

Anyone has a tip for me?

Thanks,

B.Poller

[cluberti]

There's a KB on it, and a google search for "ipp printing Windows 2000" brings up a lot of hits. And yes, it does work, I've done it with W2K and W2K3 machines with W2K, WXP, and Vista as clients.

[mikesw]

The articles seem to say that your printer must be a network printer to assign an IP address

to it. Will this work if a USB printer is attached to a computer workstation (not server)

that has an IP address assigned to it? Also the router must allow the standard port 631

through it to get to the workstation and I assume the router must do address translation to

get to the correct computer workstation within the local home subnet too.

Also I'm not sure if the printer I'm going to is IPP compliant. I presume I could setup the

IPP configuration as-if it were a non-IPP printer (although it may be) and everything would

work.

Can't LPR which has a network IP address and port be used in place of IPP which doesn't

require a webserver running to process the http request instead? The old Unix one.

I'm not sure if one must install additional windows components for file/print sharing for

the unix variant (LPR) to work under windows or not.

The reason I ask is that a friend wants to send/print info internationally to his brother back

home.

An alternative is to do print sharing I guess if I can VPN and/or tunnel over the internet to

do printing since this should work, since I can mount remote Hard drives this way.

However, I'm not sure if MSofts LPD printer protocol uses NetBios or TCP/IP. If NetBios is

used, then it will have to be tunneled within the TCP/IP packets to print then.

Edited January 15, 2008 by mikesw

[cluberti]

TCP/IP or LPR printing will work fine if the ports for either are allowed through the firewall to the machine hosting the device. I just answered the OPs question, IPP printing.

[mikesw]

Thanks for the info on IPP. I didn't know about this one.

I'll have to experiment with all the different ways to remote print

via the internet to see how it works.

BTW, I told my friend that if he is able to print to his brothers printer

in a different country, then he can send all his print jobs there and use

up all the ink on his brothers printer instead of his, Ha! Hmmmm out of ink again......!!!

Edited January 16, 2008 by mikesw