Remote Ticketing and Printing ~~~ tips and tricks

I recently had to look into options for doing off-site ticketing, with printers this time. There are many to do this. I tested quite a few of them, and here are the results:
There are many ways to connect and use PE: VPN, RDP, open the application ports on the firewall and do a public NAT for your PE app server (I didn't test this, since it could be a security risk). The option I settled on was RDP, which supports redirection of printers and ports (see next section for printing...) Testing over a VPN connection I noticed a sluggishness in PE - which I assume is due to the network latency. There is not much data going back and fourth, but instead hundreds of little requests to the app server every minute. When you add a 100 millisecond latency to each request, it really adds up to a bad user experience.  I assume that opening the application on the firewall would have the same results.  So - RDP it is then.  RDP is only sending bitmap image data, which may be more data, but the application will run much faster. I use a SSL-VPN 2000 from sonicwall to manage the connectivity, and a couple of XP virtual machines as the hosts.  The bandwidth used per workstation comes to about (from the host network's point of view) 6KBps ingress and 1.5KBps egress (or 48 Kbps up / 12Kbps down if you count in bits).  These are average numbers - the traffic fluctuates with use, so plan on twice the total for a good experience.

Printing
Now for the tricky part, as your ticket printer probably has a parallel port, and your laptop probably does not have a parallel port.  In addition, the "forward printers" feature in RDP will not create a permanent printer name for tix_printserver to use

1. First, I got an adapter cable to connect my boca miniMB as a usb printer. 
2. In order to print anything you need to install the printer on the local laptop.  I use the boca drivers for this, but it may not matter which driver you use, since it is just going to forward raw port data to the printer. 
3. After setting up the usb printer, go to printer properties > ports > check the "enable printer pooling" checkbox, and  also check the "com 3" port.  There will now be 2 ports checked; USB001 as the first, and COM3. 
4. Now on the host machine (the one you RDP to) create a local printer, and have it point to COM3.  Use the printer driver for the ticket printer.  
5. Configure your RDP terminal services connection to "forward ports".  No need to "forward printers", since we are doing it manually.
6. Print a test ticket on the host printer and also the local laptop printer.  Both should print a test ticket.
7. On the host machine, start tix_printserver.exe, and point it at the printer you just created.

 Other notes:

• If COM3 is forwarding, check device manager on the host, and disable the COM3 port if present.  This will force the host OS to send it to the RDP COM3 instead of a physical COM3.
• If your laptop has an LPT port, you can set the host to print to LPT1, and it will send it directly to the laptop's lpt1 port (without the need to install a printer on the laptop)  You will need to disable LPT1 on the host device manager > ports.

The only configuration required from users after all this setup is to start the tix_printserver.exe application once logged in.  (see BB docs about tix print server, the syntax is something like "C:\Program Files\Blackbaud\The Patron Edge\TIX_PrintServer.exe" /id36 /a /min) The salespoint configured for the host machine will be set to point to the printer you just set up, or perhaps another host's printer if you wanted to share printers.