Printer not recognized

[macombej]

I an on Fedora10, with VBox 2.2 hosting a XPSP3 guest. My HP LJ2604DN drivers work fine in the Fedora10 system and work well on my other XP system. I have configured VBox with the USB for the printer (all default based on VBox discovery of the printer). In the guest OS I cannot recognize the printer, I can load a port and assign the driver and it seems to process the test page, but never makes it to the printer. Any ideas?

[Sasquatch]

Instead of passing the printer to the VM through USB, why not share the printer on the network? If you have Linux as Host, you need to install Samba before the printer will be shared. There are plenty of howto's on the web for that. USB printing doesn't always work.

[macombej]

That is a fallback position, but because of my company VPN configuration, if I do that I have to exit my VPN everytime I want to print. My hope is that using the USB passthrough will not be blocked by VPN as the VPN will see it as a local connection.

[vbox4me2]

The purpose of a VPN is to route traffic via the tunnel, this is mainly accomplished by routing and changing the default route towards the VPN gateway. This is also the reason why other local LAN addresses can't be reached since they also get routed via the VPN, the trick here is to reroute some portions of your local LAN by adding specific routing entries(like a printer) and pointing them to your own router/gateway.

Ea.:
route add 192.168.2.123 mask 255.255.255.255 192.168.2.1 metric 1
.123 = printer
.1 = local router/gateway

[macombej]

While I agree with the posts, these are options I do not have with the VPN configuration. That is why I want to get USB support working properly. Any other ideas?

[Perryg]

USB is not available in the OSE version of VirtualBox.
You can uninstall the OSE version and then install the PUEL version from here http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

[macombej]

Wow, Sunacle reigns supreme. That was tricky of them!!! Guess I will work it over network share, I will just have to drop VPN to print. Thanks for all the great help folks!

[Perryg]

The PUEL version is still free and it works great in Linux, but the decision of course is yours.

[macombej]

Corporate box, got to pay for it.