VPN Nightmare

Northerner1

Solid State Member
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10
Apologies in advance if this is a bit long-winded but you'll need all the detail.

I connect to my office server (Small Business Server 2003) through a VPN link from home. I use the Microsoft VPN generic software. But I have one machine that fails everytime. My home setup is a Vigor router. Through this I can connect with my laptop (wireless, XP Pro), a Mesh desktop (ethernet cable, XP Pro) and an old banger eMachine (wireless, XP Home). All connect and allow me to use Outlook 2003 for my emails, contacts etc. I have another desktop (XP Home, ethernet cable) which will connect to the server but I cannot browse, cannot use remote desktop or Outlook. Just keeps coming back with "server path not found" and various like error messages. All machines are up to SP2

Problem is that this is the machine I want to use for "business" since some of my business software does not sit that easily with other standard apps.

As a Last ditch solution, I trashed the HDD and reinstalled XP Home on this PC and set up the Microsoft VPN software ONLY and attempted again but, same problem. Connected to the server, got my user name and password authenticated but could get no further. Thinking it might be a network adapter problem, I uninstalled the ethernet card and installed the wireless network card from the eMachine but, no joy.

Apart from solving the problem, I don't even understand the problem and why it only ever happens on my "business" PC.

Any help or ideas would be warmly welcomed!!!!
 
umm is there mac security on your server at work? possibly they have MAC filters so that only specified computers can connect using VPN. You might want to ask your administrator about the authentication on your server for VPN.
 
are you sure you have you firewall set to allow pptp and gre?

we had a simillar problem that a person could not connect to a VPN, but could connect to other networks, it turned out to be a problem, with havein VPN access set up at both ends, PPTP requests were not properly translated by NAT and so the TCP replies were routed to our VPN server (and dropped) rather than routher to the persons client...

This would only be a problm if you have routing and remote access setup on the PC in question.

if that is the case the way we got around it is by using another IP address from our pubic range for his outward translated traffic...
 
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