Recommended way of having users share their home printer?

[Guest]

Hi,

An item that has been giving me headaches for some time is users taking
their company (domain member) laptops home and wanting to print to printers
attached to their home (workgroup) computer.

Aside from opening ports on firewalled home computers, is there a
recommendation on an approach for configuiring this?

Reason for the question is that while I have some users who were simply able
to use the same username and password as their domain account, others were
not able to. Others still, have spaces in their usernames on Windows XP home
computers. Should I simply have them add an account that would only be used
to connect the two computers? (seems like this would only complicate things
further...).

Thanks,
Dino

 

[Lanwench [MVP - Exchange]]

Hi,

An item that has been giving me headaches for some time is users
taking their company (domain member) laptops home and wanting to
print to printers attached to their home (workgroup) computer.

Aside from opening ports on firewalled home computers, is there a
recommendation on an approach for configuiring this?

It's no problem at all.

Reason for the question is that while I have some users who were
simply able to use the same username and password as their domain
account, others were not able to.

They should be able to log into the domain using cached credentials by
default, unless you've change this via policy.

Others still, have spaces in their

usernames on Windows XP home computers. Should I simply have them
add an account that would only be used to connect the two computers?
(seems like this would only complicate things further...).

No - not needed. Once they have an IP address on the home network, and can
ping the other computer by IP address, and by name, they can connect to any
share they have permissions to -

net use x: \\homePC\share /username:homePC\username <enter>

This will then be cached and they can connect to the printer.