[CitrusHead]

I want to know if it's possible (and how-to) to print from home to a printer at the office.

The office printer is an epson 1280 hooked up to an old g4 tower.
I connect to the g4 from home all the time but USB printer sharing doesn't seem to work unless I'm connected via ethernet (i.e. at the office) to that machine. I also have an old LW 630 at he office that is part of the office network, should I be giving that machine an IP addy and trying IP printing (also something I know very little about.)

Is there a way to do this?

[OreoCookie]

It is possible, but it is not easy to configure a secure connection. The problem is that this would mean opening your computer to the whole internet. The protocols used (Apple Share (afp) or samba) are not secure enough to be opened towards the internet. So you would have to `tunnel' the connection; a tunnel is an encrypted pipe (imagine a pipe) which can contain pretty much any data stream, including smb and afp connections. This is how big companies do it.

The problem is to set up a server properly. In principle you can do it with OS X.

However, I do have another idea. You could write a script which creates a .pdf of your print job, sends over the .pdf via ssh, and then prints it out. You need to make sure you can print via the command line.

[CitrusHead]

Thanks OreoCookie,

That's a clever approach, I'll have to readup on AppleScript and give it a try.

[OreoCookie]

Actually, a shell script would only be three lines or so. I don't think AppleScript by itself will do.

Here's a simple step-by-step instruction how you could do it.

1 Make sure your remote machine can be reached from outside

This depends on your network architecture in your office. In the simplest case, you have to enable port forwarding to that specific machine. If your company doesn't have a fixed IP, I would recommend using dyndns.org so you have a dns name whose IP is updated on a regular basis.

If you have a more sophisticated network, and each machine can be reached from the internet, it's even easier.


2 Create public and private SSH keys

Read here how to do it.


3 Make sure you can print from the command line

Open the Terminal and choose an appropriate document, e. g. a .pdf. Enter `lp "[name of pdf]"'. If the document is printed, you are set to go.


4 Create the print script on your remote machine

Open your text editor of choice on the remote machine.
Enter

lp -d [printer name] $1
(If the Epson printer is the default printer on the remote machine, lp $1 will suffice.)

and save it in a suitable directory under a suitable name, e. g. ~/Library/unix/remotePrint.sh. Use chmod 755 ~/Library/unix/remotePrint.sh to make it executable.


6 Script on your local machine

Create a script on your local machine and save it in a suitable directory.
It should contain something like

scp $1 [username on remote machine]@[name or ip of remote machine]:/tmp/
ssh [username on remote machine]@[name or ip of remote machine] /Users/Library/unix/remotePrint.sh


7 If you want, you can wrap this in a simple AppleScript.

do shell executes a shell script under AppleScript. Make sure to use the file name as parameter.

Then create a droplet on your desktop or so which allows you to print a document by dragging a pdf or so to the droplet.


Note that I'm just outlining the basic ideas here, this is by no means a complete solution.