VPN and printing to network printer

[Colin Bondi]

We have an odd situation with clients at a remote office being able to print
to a local printer while connected to the main site via VPN. We have a
Windows 2000 RAS server at the main site serving VPN. At the remote site we
have Windows XP machines on a LAN connected to the internet via DSL. The
Windows XP machines share one printer that is connected to one of the
machines and the rest print to it over the local LAN. Each Windows XP
machine connects to the main site using the built in MS VPN client and then
launches a remote desktop session to a Windows 2000 terminal server at the
main site. To enable each client to print while connected to the terminal
server, we setup the network printer at the local site as a local printer on
each machine by redirecting the lpt3 port to the printer network share. This
works and each client RDP session maps the printer to the session on the
terminal server. The problem we are having is that clients are losing their
connection to the local printer when the VPN session is active. I'm
wondering if this is because when the VPN connection is active on a client
machine, the connection to the local LAN is disrupted? Any thoughts of this
would be appreciated.
Colin

 

[Robert L [MS-MVP]]

posting the VPN client routing table here may help.

Bob Lin, MS-MVP, MCSE & CNE
Networking, Internet, Routing, VPN Troubleshooting on http://www.ChicagoTech.net
How to Setup Windows, Network, VPN & Remote Access on http://www.HowToNetworking.com
We have an odd situation with clients at a remote office being able to print
to a local printer while connected to the main site via VPN. We have a
Windows 2000 RAS server at the main site serving VPN. At the remote site we
have Windows XP machines on a LAN connected to the internet via DSL. The
Windows XP machines share one printer that is connected to one of the
machines and the rest print to it over the local LAN. Each Windows XP
machine connects to the main site using the built in MS VPN client and then
launches a remote desktop session to a Windows 2000 terminal server at the
main site. To enable each client to print while connected to the terminal
server, we setup the network printer at the local site as a local printer on
each machine by redirecting the lpt3 port to the printer network share. This
works and each client RDP session maps the printer to the session on the
terminal server. The problem we are having is that clients are losing their
connection to the local printer when the VPN session is active. I'm
wondering if this is because when the VPN connection is active on a client
machine, the connection to the local LAN is disrupted? Any thoughts of this
would be appreciated.
Colin