How do I configure my firewall?

Q: What steps should I perform on my firewall to enable RPM Remote Print Manager® (“RPM”) to receive print jobs from a system that is outside the firewall, perhaps from the Internet or WAN connection?

A: To answer this question you will need to know how your firewall is configured, and which protocol you will be using to print.

Firewall: NAT

If your firewall is performing Network Address Translation (NAT), you will configure port forwarding on your firewall.

• If you are using the LPR/LPD protocol, and your firewall is performing NAT, you will forward traffic coming in on port 515 to the internal IP address of the RPM host.
• If you are using streams and your firewall is performing NAT you will forward traffic on whichever port you configured on the sending side (e.g. 9100) to the internal IP address of the RPM host.

Firewall: not NAT

If your firewall is not performing NAT, you will simply allow data to go through your firewall. This is called relaxing a port.

• If you are using the LPR/LPD protocol, you will relax port 515 on your firewall.
• If you are using streams printing, you will relax the appropriate port number. The port number you relax will depend on how your printer is configured on the sending side; typically, it will be in the range of 9100-9200, but could be any port number between 1 and 65535.

Note: Streams printing may be referred to like any of the following: Socket Printing, Reverse Telnet, or Telnet Printing.

Note: Your firewall may require you to supply the type of connection; both LPR/LPD and streams printing are TCP connections, not UDP.