Remote desktop users print from home?

October 3, 2005 7:22 PM

A client of mine wants their employees to be able to print out documents at their house while connected to the office server through remote desktop. Is this possible?

The office is run on a Windows 2003 Small business server pdc. I tried searching on google, but don't really know what to search for. Thanks everyone!

posted by meta87 to technology (8 comments total)

Well... are the connecting to the server itself (running something like Terminal Serivces) or are they connecting to their workstations?

I'm not sure exactly how it works, but my OS X version of Remote Desktop has an option that says "Connect automatically to these local devices when logged on to the remote server" and then lists "disk drives" and "printers".

So yes, using RDC I'd imagine it's possible.
posted by sbutler at 7:38 PM on October 3, 2005

sbutler, "Remote Desktop" is the new name for "Terminal Services".

I searched the MS Knowledge Base for "remote desktop printing" and the first hit seems relevant:

How To Make a Local Printer Available During a Connection to a Remote Desktop in Windows XP Professional
posted by mendel at 8:03 PM on October 3, 2005

Depending on what's doing the internal network routing, you could set up a VPN. Then all the remote clients would act like local clients, with all the same capabilities (printing, shared network folders, etc...) without the security vulnerabilities of leaving remote desktop running 24/7. That may be a more technical solution than you want to pursue, however.
posted by fatbobsmith at 8:12 PM on October 3, 2005

Microsoft's Remote Desktop Client will indeed let you connect local printers to your remote client session — in some cases, automatically adding them to your My Printers folder.
posted by Rothko at 8:25 PM on October 3, 2005

Wow, thanks everyone!

That link you provided mendel looks like it's exacty what I'm looking for.

I will also explore the vpn option fatbobsmith, thanks.
posted by meta87 at 9:32 PM on October 3, 2005

IME, The trouble with remote-client printer mapping is that it often wants to have the printer driver installed on the Terminal Server as well as the client. Lately, that's been improved w/ the "universal printer driver" but it's not quite seamless. It also generally expects the client printer to be connected via Parallel, which hardly happens anymore. The worst part is, the least functional terminal printing drivers are for the junky inkjets that everybody got free with thier Dell. To the extent possible, limiting the universe of craptacular usb-connected inkjets you are compelled to deal with will help save your sanity. And watch out for mopiers, they are treated slightly differently at the port level.. headaches.
posted by Triode at 11:28 PM on October 3, 2005

Damn, Damn and Damn.
The one question I can answer....

1) If you're going for the Windows way of printing, make sure that the remote user has either a PCL or PostScript Printer. Other types of printers tend to screw everything up. Also, make sure that the printer drivers for the remote printer are available natively to Win2k3 and have been installed on your server.

2) If all else fails, use something like EOL Universal Printer. This is expensive, but it works a lot better than Microsoft's solution.
posted by seanyboy at 12:48 AM on October 4, 2005

3) Finally, install a PDF Printer on the terminal server. Copy the resultant printed PDF Files to your local machine (by sharing local drives and printing files to //tsclient/c) and print them from there. This is not an ideal solution, but it's better than nothing.
posted by seanyboy at 12:51 AM on October 4, 2005