Printing Via a VPN to a locally networked printer

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:confused:

Hi all,

I'll give you a quick run down of the setup we have. 4 pc's running win 7 32bit on a work group at a remote site, they have a printer that is connected to each via IP (i.e. set up a standard ip port on each machine and mapped the printer to it), there is no server at this site.

The users need to access resource, i.e. network shares and a bunch of apps which are installed on a terminal server back at the main site. The users VPN to the main site to access these. The problem i am having is how can i get the users to print back to the IP printer locally networked?

The problems i am having are that as soon as the user connects to the VPN they loose connection to the networked printer, I have set the RDP client to forward the printers through and these are visible on the RDP session on the terminal server. When the user sends a print to the redirected printer, the queue shows the print job enter and leave, then if i minimise the RDP session and look at the print queue locally i can see a job in the queue called "Remote Desktop Redirected Printer Doc". If i leave the VPN connected this eventually times out and errors, if i disconnect the VPN while the the doc is still in the queue it will print.

I can get it to work if i share the printer via usb from a machine then VPN and RDP to the Terminal server, but not if i am connecting to it via an IP port. Also doing this way means that only 1 of the 4 machines can print, because a soon as the pc with the printer connects to VPN the rest loose connection.

I looked in to redirecting the printer to an LPT port, but that seems to require the printer to be share from another machine/server (using: net use LPTx \\servername\sharename).

Any ideas?

Cheers

Locrieth
 
Whats providing the VPN? If you set it so that it doesn't use the VPN as the gateway then you'll be able to access resources on both networks.
 
We're using cisco VPN client V5.0.07.0290 and connecting back to a cisco VPN concentrator back at the main site. Not really sure what you mean about the gateway?
 
Right thanks very much for your help, but we found what the problem was. There was a setting on the concentrator for the group i was using to connect with that sent all traffic over the vpn, so we used a different group and had settings to only tunnel certain subnets over the VPN and send all other traffic to the LAN.
 
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