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Linux local printing when logged on to a Terminal Services Session

Hi everyone, here is a little bit of a background to the problem. Our company used to have 2 servers - 1x Win 2000 and 1x 2003 Enterprise, we currently have approx 20 client pc some attached locally but some are in remote offices. All clients are running Win XP, during a recent review we noticed a number of clients had no genuine OS license neither did the 2003 server.

Anyway to cut a long story short we've now bought in 2 new servers (1x 2003 SBS and 1x 2003 Terminal Server) with genuine licenses via OVL. To save a bit of money we're looking into using Linux for our remote client PC's, we set one up with Suse 10.2 and Gnome which connects fine via TSclient (www.gnomepro.com) and all is great except for the printers that are connected locally to the remote client PC's.

TSClient doesn't seem to support local printers (it's not listed in the' local resourse' tab unlike XP RDP).

Is there any way for the remote client (using Linux) to print to their local printer when logged in to a Terminal Services session? I want to be able to print directly from Access reports to the printer so there's no way to cut and paste into a local file for later printing.

Many thanks for any help you can give.

BLipman

You could use a logon script to map the printers from your server session to the printers needed. Here is a way to do it:

REM rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /in /n \\server1\hp-printer

ifmember "NetServices"
if errorlevel 1 rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /in /n \\fileserver\NetSvcsLJ1200

etc...

This way you can assign printers to groups of users all within Windows and don't need to bother with making a TS client play nice. Now your remote users would be a different story. A VPN or P-P T1 would still allow you to map the printers but through the internet you would need to start opening up firewall ports. Anyway, that's what I would try.

atokata

Are the two offices connected by a VPN of some sort? You could use some type of print server, or network aware workgroup printer, at the remote office, and simply list it in the directory on your SBS box. Then, put the users at the remote office into their own OU, and use group policy to cause the print server at that office to be their default.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

DonConsolio

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DonConsolio

looks like tsclient does not support the "-r" flag to rdesktop

you could try wrapping rdesktop into a script and add the "-r" parameter there.

DonConsolio

second update :-)

start tsclient with the "-x FILE" option (write your "-r ....." flags to FILE)

Thompsonit

ASKER

Thanks Don, your solution worked but between original Q and answer we dropped SuSe and went with PCLinux instead, you can still have the points for the work you did :)

Thanks again

Dave

DonConsolio

thanks