[TriLUG] printing, vpn, stuff

[Brian Henning]

Hi,
  The company for which I work is spooling up to open a distribution 
warehouse on the west coast.  The prevailing idea of how to handle orders 
seems to be to continue taking orders here in the east coast facility, and 
pass the appropriate orders along to the west coast warehouse for shipping. 
The thought that has been prevalent has been to set up a remote printing 
situation in which our sales staff can take orders here, click Print, and 
automagically the order prints on a printer in California.
  This sounds to me like a prime candidate for VPN.  In order to simplify 
things on this end, I was considering using our linux server to maintain the 
VPN connection and printer share, then share that printer internally among 
all the workstations (i.e. the workstations simply think they're printing to 
the linux host; only the linux machine knows the printer is on the other end 
of a vpn tunnel).
  Is this a sane idea?  Is there a better way to achieve this goal?  I've 
never set up a VPN before; are there any certain gotchas out for which I 
ought to look?

Thanks grandly,
~Brian


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Brian A. Henning
Strutmasters.com
866.597.2397
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