Newbie Here looking over addresses in DHCP & found RAS ????? 1

[ftoddt]

I am real new at this. I was looking over my addresses in DHCP and noticed one computer in our LAN had 3 ip addresses. In the nic card identification of two of the addresses it said RAS instead of a typical mac address.
The little computer icons on the far left that are angled and have arrows and little telephones with them. I looked at the computer and there is no modem attached to it. We do not have any remote access to our LAN at this time. I have seen hacktools/viruses before and know we have had trojens but all virus scans show clean.
Can anyone tell me what I am seeing and if it is a security breach or something I should really worry about.
Thanks
Todd

 

[jfc1003]

RAS will reserve IP addresses for itself if the RAS service is configured and started. How many IP addresses it reserves depends on the configuration. I would take a look at the machine that has reserved the IP addresses and check to see if the Routing and Remote Access service is running.

If it is, then the question is...why is it running. If you are running a Windows 2000 Server, go to Administrative tools, Routing and Remote Access, and see if that machine is configured and started. It will have a down red arrow or a green up arrow. If it is green, your machine has some kind of RAS configuration, most likely to allow VPN access.

Go from there. If you find something in RAS you don't understand, bring it back to the forum, or do some reading up on RAS configuration with the help menus, or just turn off RAS by right clicking the server name and choosing the Disable option. But understand, if you disable, you lose all configuration, which means if you needed RAS after all, you will have to reconfigure.

 

[ftoddt]

jfc1003,
Thank You so much for your help. I will do all those things. From what I understand from you, this RAS servcie would be on the client computer and not caused by any server/client within our LAN. Do you need RAS for anything other than VPN access like VNC viewer access from outside the LAN?

 

[jfc1003]

The RAS service can run on any client, Server or Workstation. Typically you need RAS anytime you are remotely connecting via a VPN or via a modem. RAS is needed because it acts like a router and gives you an IP address so that you can communicate with devices on the remote network that you are connected to.

If you are using VNC from a remote location, I would assume you are doing a VPN to connect to the network? Somehow you have to be on the network before VNC will be able to remotely connect to the computer you wish to take control of. I use a Microsoft VPN (which uses RAS on my server at work) Then when I am connected, I start up VNC to remotely control a server or workstation on my work network.