Share a printer as IP address?

[Direwolf20]

Ok guys, this may sound like a crazy question, so bear with me .

I want to take a printer that I have on my system, and share it as an IP address, so that a print job that comes in to a specific IP address can print out on this printer.

More specifically, I want to share my Win2PDF print driver, so that a print job, sent by an outside company, can come in through our firewall, get routed to my Win2PDF printer driver, and create a PDF file.

Any ideas?

 

[djnes]

I'm wondering if this is what Internet Printing is for. As far as I know, from a base config, you can't assign an IP to a non-networked printer. Are these remote people members of your domain? If so, it could be shared pretty easy.

Is that Win2PDF free?

 

[pigster]

You can do this if you have IIS installed:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=323428

I've tried it, and given up because we found it very slow and unreliable. Found that using VPN and attaching to a shared printer was much easier

 

[Direwolf20]

The remote people are not part of the domain, unfortunately. We're in a Novell enviornment anyway.

Currently, the way it works, is they send a print job to our outside IP address, which then gets routed through our firewall to an internal IP printer. Its not like a shared printer "\\servername\sharename", but just a direct IP address: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Their system is very old-school, and the data comes over as straight text.

 

[ameoba]

Are we talking unix lp/lpr protocol?

 

[Direwolf20]

Are we talking unix lp/lpr protocol?

Maybe?

 

[-Sean Casey]

Sounds like they are submitting print jobs via LPR. I work with this every day as our commerical printers are operated off of Solaris 9 and Solaris 10 boxes and the submission is performed direct to the IP address and queue name using LPR.

As far as doing this to a software printer such as PDF generator... IIS might be capable of being setup to allow this, otherwise I wonder if you could setup a linux or unix box (or even run linux in a virtual machine) where it is connected to the shared windows printer and then share that out via LPR? (not even sure if you can do this, but if technically possible it could work).

Of course if you are looking at submitting files for PDF generation use Acrobat. Setup distiller for a "watch folder" and publish the "watch folder" out as an FTP site. There are some Acrobat plugins available to support additional file types.