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Microsoft introduced a feature in Windows 2000 called the
Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), which enables you to print to and manage a
printer across the Internet over HTTP and port 80. The benefit to using IPP is
that you can access printers behind firewalls. The flipside is that IPP
simplifies firewall administration and configuration by not requiring
additional ports other than port 80, which is also used for Web browsing.

A computer running Windows 2000 Professional or later can
serve as an IPP printing host, serving its printers out to remote clients.
Setup does not automatically configure your printers to enable IPP when you install
Internet Information Services (IIS) on a Windows 2000 Professional computer.
However, you can set it up manually.

  1. After you install IIS on the Professional system, open the IIS console, right-click
    the Default Web Site, and choose New | Virtual Directory to start the Virtual
    Directory wizard.
  2. Under the site, add a virtual directory with an alias of Printers that
    points to %systemroot%\Web\printers. Set the
    permissions to include Read And Run Scripts.
  3. Open the Properties for the Printers virtual folder and click the Documents tab.
  4. Add the default document Page1.asp, remove the other default documents, and click
    OK.
  5. To print to or manage a printer on the target computer, connect to
    http://[computer]/printers, where [computer] is the IP address or
    fully-qualified host name of the computer hosting the printer.
  6. If you can’t see the Printers from the client browser, stop and restart the
    Default Web Site in the IIS console.

Note: The client must support IPP to take full advantage of
printing across the Internet. Windows 2000 and later clients support IPP.
You’ll find a Windows 9x client for IPP on the Windows 2000 Server CD in
\Clients\Win9xipp.cli.