Connecting to Printers with Remote Desktop Connection

When you connect in to our data centre using our Remote Desktop Connection Client, you can print to your USB printer as if it was connected to our data centre.

When you log in, within the Remote Desktop Connection Client Options page, you can connect remote printers.  Tick this option.  When you next log into our data centre, the device drivers for your printer will be loaded up when your desktop loads as part of the log on process.  This may take up to 60 seconds as these printer drivers are dynamically loaded from the connection information supplied by your PC.

At the end of your session, these device drivers are unloaded and your printer is no longer available on the Remote Desktop session.

If you experience difficulty in printing, we as Administrators may need to load device drivers for non standard USB printers should the data centre not already have the drivers pre-loaded.  All we need to know to do this is the make and model of printer you have.  Should the printer install program need a reboot as part of the install, then this will be accomplished overnight for you.

Notes:-

  • We have an issue with some Lexmark printers as they use their own spooler and ink management program to print rather than proper Windows printer drivers.  This means that certain Lexmark printers do not work properly with Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection client in a data centre environment.
  • Please also note that Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection client is an updated extension to Microsoft's original Terminal Services and Remote Desktop allows remote USB printing whereby Terminal Services does not.
  • Some multifunctional devices do not use the USB port configuration, but instead connect via USB using the DOT4 port configuration.  You can check this by looking at the port properties of your local printer in your control panel.  By default, your local computer is does not pass any DOT4 printers to our data centre when logging in, but you can change this by referring to Microsoft Knowledge Base article 302361.
  • Connecting to our data centre via a web browsers does not support remote printing.
  • You need to provide your own drivers for Mac OSX and Linux.

It is additionally possible to print to a fixed public IP address if you have a fixed public IP address on your broadband connection.  Please let us know your public IP address, make and model of printer and the users who you wish to grant permission to print to it and we will set this up for you.  You will also need to enable port forwarding on TCP port 9100 on your router and forward any data packets received to your local printers internal fixed IP address.