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We have recently opened up a satellite office about 500 Km away from our main office. The office consists of 2 staff, and some of our office workers make their way out to this office every once in a while.

Currently, those users connect to our Terminal server and connect to their printer there via local resource sharing (both computers simply have the print driver installed on their computer). This setup is causing some problems, namely with latency issues with printing. It seems the jobs take a long time to start up, and the local resource sharing is causing an issue bringing the printer out of energy saver mode. For this reason, we're looking into a site-to-site VPN.

While VPN tunnels are not foreign to me, site-to-site ones are - especially with Windows authentication. We've got MikroTik routers on both sites, and I've been looking at implementing an IPSEC tunnel from our main office to our remote office.

My question(s) are this

1) How will this setup affect my users authentication into our main system? Will they be able to logon to my domain with the regular windows logon screen or will they need to authenticate whenever they access separate resources (e-mail / shared drives, etc)

2) If I put the print drivers on my print server in my main office, will the users in the Ottawa office be able to use that? When users from our main office go to Ottawa they typically logon to their terminal server profile - our current setup doesn't allow them to print to the printers at the satellite office unless their on one of the two computers that has the print drivers installed on them. It would be nice if they could print from a laptop when connected to RDC to the printer in the Satellite office.

As always, your insight is always appreciated.

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  • What kind of printer is it, you should be able to change the sleep mode setting, either disable it or change the time for it to take effect. Also, is it an IP printer, just set it up on the Term Server directly. Once you have the VPN set up
    – Tom
    Sep 15, 2011 at 14:56
  • Thanks Tom. It's a Xerox 6505 and I believe the issue is with the machine itself and not the remote connection because it doesn't wake up even when a job is printed from the local machine that has the drivers installed. With the site-to-site VPN set up, does the printer receive an IP address based on the satellite networks subnet or the main office subnet?
    – DKNUCKLES
    Sep 15, 2011 at 15:12
  • It'll recieve the IP from the local network, the VPN will translate it. As for the Xerox, I have not found anything definative but check out the internal config website of the printer and see if you can disable or change the time of the sleep-mode
    – Tom
    Sep 15, 2011 at 21:33

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