Comments on: Printing at Home when Connected to a VPN

By: Leslie Horst

Leslie Horst — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 03:52:18 +0000

In my case – home network, Ethernet, networked printer (i.e., no computer is serving as the print server), 3 computers – I have exactly the same problem with printing (i.e., I can’t) when VPN’d to my workplace. How would your procedure be modifed in that case?

By: Mehdi

Mehdi — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 17:51:59 +0000

Dude thank you ever so much. I have spent hours looking for a solution and yours worked like a charm…

By: Sandra

Sandra — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 03:59:15 +0000

Thank you! I was about to toss out the computer because of this persistent trouble when I was trying to print. I’m far from a computer geek, but was able to figure it out with your clear instructions.

By: frank lin

frank lin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:10:50 +0000

Awesome! it worked like a Charm! Thanks.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:01:22 +0000

Thanks so much for posting this guide. I work in a one-person office so it’s a lot like being at home, especially when tech support in the mother ship don’t understand the quirks of the local setup. Anyway, I’d searched high and low for a way to be able to print to the office printer (which is hooked up to the network and has its own IP address) when using the VPN.

The only part of your instructions that didn’t work for me was creating a persistent route, so I used a batch file. Since the user account under which I use the corporate VPN is very locked down I needed also to add the “runas” command to get it to work. So now I log onto VPN, click the batch file, enter local admin password, and hey presto I can print for the rest of the VPN session…! Here’s my batch file in case anyone else has the same problems.

runas /noprofile /user:[computername]\[localadminusername] “route add [printer IP address] MASK 255.255.255.255 [router IP address”
pause

Thanks again!

By: adam

adam — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:31:35 +0000

Ralph,

Explaining how to add/remove a printer is a little beyond the scope of this little write up – if you are mucking about with network settings and running a VPN then it’s kind of assumed you can add/remove hardware. A quck bit of Googling “Add a printer windows” got me this link for Vista:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Add-or-remove-a-printer

If you are using something else, try Googling for that version more specifically.

Good luck.

Adam

By: Ralph

Ralph — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:20:52 +0000

This is great – I would love to be able to use my home network computer while VPN’d to work!

Regarding:

“Number 3 is easily checked in the properties of the printer you added to your machine – if it is added with the name rather than the IP address, just modify (or delete and re-add) it.”

Could you provide some more details about this? I went to Control Panel, Printers, right clicked on the networked printer, and selected properties. There I see, under the General tab, an unnamed entry field that has the name of the printer in it, a “Location” field that is blank, and a “Comment” field that is blank. Should I change one of these fields?

Regarding how I added it, I really don’t know if I added it by Name or by IP address because I ran a Canon MX700 Wizard and, at the end of the process, the printer showed up on the list. If I now delete the printer, then the only process I know to add it back is to rerun the Wizard, which I expect would do the same thing it did before.

Thanks,

Ralph