Remote desktop - nearly working!
Hello to all out there 
I have had great help before - and now I have a new problem - can anyone assist?
I am trying to set up remote access from a home location to an office 50 miles away.
The main office has a LAN of 5 machines – peer-to-peer mix of Win2K and XP Pro with fixed IP addresses - connected to the internet via a Vigor 2600plus router; there is also a branch office with 3 machines connected by VPN. Both locations share the same Workgroup.
The `home’ installation is an XP Pro laptop has a 2Mbit connection accessed through a Sagem broadband modem.
The new service was seen as an extension of existing facilities. The LAN has a Win 2K server running database-type applications, and access to it from the branch is fast enough over the VPN. However, one XP Pro machine in the main office runs a demanding package (SAGE), and - to get speedy response times at the branch office - it is accessed when required over the VPN by use of remote desktop. This works well, and the intention was to achieve the same thing from home.
The new service works – almost! A remote dial-in VPN is set up to log on to the router – this works OK. Then remote desktop is started, with `Options/Local Resources’ set to make printer, disk drives and serial ports available to the host machine. All the host applications are accessible, and the remote client drives can be seen and accessed within Network\Microsoft Terminal Services\\tsclient - but the printer is not accessible.
(When setting up remote desktop connection there is a security warning that disk drives and serial ports will be made available to the host machine – no reference to the printer.)
I cannot see why the printer is not accessible. The Windows firewall on the client is off; its local printer works locally, is set as default and is shared.
I have set the whole thing up on 2 laptops, one using a Lexmark printer, the other an Epson, with the same result.
Can anyone suggest a remedy, or where I am going wrong? Help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks .... Iain
I have had great help before - and now I have a new problem - can anyone assist?
I am trying to set up remote access from a home location to an office 50 miles away.
The main office has a LAN of 5 machines – peer-to-peer mix of Win2K and XP Pro with fixed IP addresses - connected to the internet via a Vigor 2600plus router; there is also a branch office with 3 machines connected by VPN. Both locations share the same Workgroup.
The `home’ installation is an XP Pro laptop has a 2Mbit connection accessed through a Sagem broadband modem.
The new service was seen as an extension of existing facilities. The LAN has a Win 2K server running database-type applications, and access to it from the branch is fast enough over the VPN. However, one XP Pro machine in the main office runs a demanding package (SAGE), and - to get speedy response times at the branch office - it is accessed when required over the VPN by use of remote desktop. This works well, and the intention was to achieve the same thing from home.
The new service works – almost! A remote dial-in VPN is set up to log on to the router – this works OK. Then remote desktop is started, with `Options/Local Resources’ set to make printer, disk drives and serial ports available to the host machine. All the host applications are accessible, and the remote client drives can be seen and accessed within Network\Microsoft Terminal Services\\tsclient - but the printer is not accessible.
(When setting up remote desktop connection there is a security warning that disk drives and serial ports will be made available to the host machine – no reference to the printer.)
I cannot see why the printer is not accessible. The Windows firewall on the client is off; its local printer works locally, is set as default and is shared.
I have set the whole thing up on 2 laptops, one using a Lexmark printer, the other an Epson, with the same result.
Can anyone suggest a remedy, or where I am going wrong? Help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks .... Iain
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I have now got the thing working. I just could not get it going with a Lexmark USB printer, but starting all over again with a freshly downloaded driver for an Epson C60 applied to the host and to the client, connected by parallel cable, it now works.
What made the difference - I do not know!
Anyway, cheers to all
Iain