Re: Unable to access hosts by name across a PPTP VPN connection

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On Jun 8, 5:30 am, "Sooner Al [MVP]" <Soone...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
<elvis_costell...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:1181247869.711837.4430@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx





Hi Al,

Again, I really appreciate the response. This is a combination of me
wanting to learn more about configuring MS VPNs and also solving some
practical problems I have. Hope this doesn't come across as too
academic, but to me these are also real problems that NetBIOS would
solve that LMHOSTS won't, frankly. I'd really like to know how to
forward NetBIOS traffic across the MS VPN to satisfy my learning goals
and also make administering my VPN a bit more automatic and easier at
the same time. The long descriptions above are just me trying to be
very detailed about my reservations about LMHOSTS, not a complete
dismissal of the idea ;-). LMHOSTS is certainly is easier to setup in
many ways and in many cases, but, IMO for my network, requires more
work for me to administer as new machines are added to my local
network and as new machines are used as VPN clients. It's clear to me
this additional administration work will definitely generate problems
for me (since I can't be there all the time to make sure everything
runs smoothly) and also will be frustrating to the people I'm trying
to provide access to (e.g. "why doesn't Paul's laptop appear in My
Network Places?? - Paul's laptop just connected to your home network
and I'm logged into the VPN" or "why can't Jim's home laptop see
Sally's files in My Network Places? - Sally's using some random
university desktop as a VPN client and she's just logged in - whatdya
mean we'll have to wait 'til you're off work to do this??!?").

The best way to characterise my VPN usage is that I'll have a
relatively small number of VPN user accounts and (for now) a
corresponding small number of people using these accounts and a low
number of simultaneous connections (for now, so 1 max is OK - and it's
also a learning experience), but I'll have a relatively large number
of machines I'll need to support as VPN clients. One big current goal
is to have any remote machine configured to behave as a VPN client
just show up in My Network Places after it logs in. On the local
side, I have 5 machines and occasionally have some laptops come in and
out of the network. The overall goal is to make it very very
incredibly mind-numbingly simple to transfer files between any remote
machine to any local machine, regardless of whether it's a laptop,
PDA, desktop and (eventually, but definitely not until I have Windows
Home VPN client to Windows Home VPN server connections working)
regardless of OS as I have Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows Home Edition,
and Windows Mobile Second Edition machines so far. This latter reason
has me very motivated to make most changes on my VPN server only to
minimize the need to account for differences on the VPN client
systems. In other words, I don't have a simple network. We're a
combination of musicians, coffee junkies, tech geeks, math nerds,
etc. and we've all got our own situations where we gotta transfer
files and some people want to use My Network Places instead of toting
around lists of IP addresses :).

I'll keep looking around. Hope there's a solution out there. If I
get this working I'll post the step by step to help out anyone else.
Best regards.

You might be interested in OpenVPN as an alternative.

http://openvpn.net/

If I remember correctly if you use a bridge mode of operation versus a
routed mode of operation NetBIOS traffic will go over the VPN tunnel. It may
be worth experimenting with.

http://openvpn.net/faq.html#bridge1

I have some example config files, etc on this page...

http://theillustratednetwork.mvps.org/OpenVPN/OpenVPN.html

Good luck...

--

Al Jarvi (MS-MVP Windows Networking)

Please post *ALL* questions and replies to the news group for the
mutual benefit of all of us...
The MS-MVP Program -http://mvp.support.microsoft.com
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no
rights...
How to ask a questionhttp://support.microsoft.com/KB/555375

This looks really promising. Any VPN software capable of bridging
it's VPN and network interfaces is likely to give me what I'm looking
for. Plus, it removes the one connection limit imposed by the Windows
XP PPTP Server and seems to be very well put together and also has
options galore. I'll definitely be reading more about it. Thanks for
the pointer. Cheers.

.

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