Bluetooth print servers....?

[philg]

Hi there Now that my wife has her own pc, I need to look at giving her access to the two printers that I have in my office (HP Laserjet 6p and Canon IP4300) I'd use regular wireless networking (I already have a wifi network in the house) but as I spend most of my time tunelled into work via vpn, that would mean I'd lose access to the printers myself So, I am looking at bluetooth enabling both printers with bluetooth print servers (adding bluetooth to both pcs, will be simple) Are there any pitfalls I need to be aware of? I'm sure the Laserjet 6P will be easy - it's a fairly dumb printer But the IP4300 does do bidirectional communications (reporting ink levels and the like) - will this still work over bluetooth? Many thanks for any suggestions/hints/tips/scare stories etc! Cheers Phil G

[ACtheTROLL]

I'm reasonably sure the biggest pitfall is it won't work

It depends on the VPN client...
vpn protects the connection by giving it an IP address allocated by the VPN server however it also encrypts the pipeline so it gets a little zen ... your pipe has three ip addresses (your lan, the wan are rthe transport but the data is directed and decrypted through the server's subnet)
(oversimplified ... but go with it)

non IP ports work ok (serial, parallel and USB) - but ethernet, bluetooth and some firewire can be difficult or impossible to connect as they are in the transport layer not the data layer

but it depends mainly on your software

you'll be far better talking to your tech support ... we never name security products to outsiders

[philg]

Rats

I was kind of hoping that Bluetooth would be completely outside my IP network (LAN, WAN or VPN), but it sounds like it isn't

Bother (or words to that effect)

[rojash]

At around 55 quid for an IP4300, surely the cheapest and easiest answer is just to buy your wife a printer?

[philg]

Well, that assumes I have the real estate to put a THIRD printer in "my" office. It would be much easier to share one (especially if she can use it wirelessly from wherever she happens to be)