I am running two Win2K VMWare virtual machines under Linux. When I VPN into my corporate or client network with the virtual machines, I am unable to print to network printers, because the VPN client stops all network traffic except that through the tunnel.
VMWare allows you to redirect the virtual machine's LPT port output to a file on the host (Linux) machine. If the lpt redirect file is a fifo, and I run lpr -P queue < fifo, I can successfully send one job from the Windows machine whether it's VPN'd in or not. It looks to me like lpr stops reading from the pipe when it gets an EOF.
Since this is the smartest group of people I know (flattery never hurts, eh?), does anyone have any ideas on how to make this persistent? I suck at Unix IPC.
