PPC VPN woes

From: Jason (jas0420_at_gmail.com)
Date: 10/07/04 

Date: 7 Oct 2004 08:45:34 -0700

Hi gang. We just acquired 3 HP 6315's to eval at work, and for the
past week have been trying to get VPN to play nicely. I'm out of
ideas and have searched the web til I'm blue in the face, so I thought
I'd pick your brains...

I've got 4 VPN options at my disposal:

1) PPTP/L2TP to a Cisco 3030
2) PPTP to a Cisco PIX
3) PPTP/L2TP to a Windows 2003 w/ RRAS
4) IPSEC with Movian to Cisco 3030

I can get #1 to connect, but it drops off immediately after. Have
given up on that as an option.

I can get #'s 2 and 3 to connect and maintain a connection, but I'm
finding that I'm very limited in what actually works across the VPN:

* I can ping anything and everything on my inside network that I want
to. Both by name and by IP address.

* I've got a Telnet app on the PPC that works through it (can attach
to any router I choose inside my private network).

* Remote ActiveSync to my laptop on the private network would never
fully attach though (it started trying to connect on both sides, but
eventually timed out).

* Terminal Service client won't ever connect. Tried it to multiple
servers. Installed PocketHosts just to make sure it wasn't a DNS
problem. Tried by IP address as well to make triple sure.

* We have private IM running on our Exchange servers. I can actually
attach to it through VPN, see who's online, send them messages, but
the return messages to me fail. If I also try to use the external IM
client (hotmail account) at the same time, the VPN disconnects.

I've had much better luck with Movian. With the exception of remote
ActiveSync and IM, everything else seems to work. Orriginally, Movian
wasn't a good solution for me because there's no auto-connect feature.
 Manual login every time, so keeping the PPC sync'd with email and all
was not the background process that it should be. Since then, we've
installed Mobile Info Server and that is working great, so that is not
as much of an issue any more. Movian seems to be getting out of the
"off-the-shelf" product business though, so I'm not too excited about
investing in them. And it is really to the point that I KNOW all of
this should work through a plain-Jane PPTP tunnel, so I've made it a
quest to get it working!

I have read/understood that MS Messenger performs a local lookup of
it's IP address and bundles it along with the message it transmits.
When behind a WAP or VPN, it's going to pull that IP (192.168.1.50 for
example) and the remote side will be trying to return to that IP
(which it can't in our 10.x.x.x world...). tried with a WAP set up in
the 10.x.x.x range to where I could add a route to handle it, but
still couldn't get it to go. Found that you can change the binding
order of the adapters on a regular PC to evidently get around this
(move the Remote Access Connection to the top of the list) but have
yet to find an equivelant for PPC.

So that's where I'm at. Frustrated, but not quite beaten to the
ground yet. Any advice/things to try?

Many thanks,
Jason

Relevant Pages

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