Newbie questions: 2 routers/name resolution

[stevemayman]

Greetings,

I am not in the IT field, just a small business owner who can’t yet afford consultants. I have maintained our network for about 10 years by keeping it simple. Now I have tried to add a VPN and am finding that it is not simple! You all seem very smart and hope you can straighten me out.

The goal: to set up a VPN server at our office that I can access remotely through a wireless connection on my laptop. My original vision was to simply connect and see all network resources just as I do at work, but fear that this is impossible with XP.

Details: The network at the office is comprised of 5 XP computers (dynamic IP) sharing a single DSL (dynamic IP) connection through a Linksys router (BEFW11S4 V.2 with Firmware 1.45.10), 2 plotters directly on the network with static IP addresses (192.168.1.150 and 151) and a printer shared through one of the dynamic IP machines. My home “network” is simply a Linksys WRT54G router with a DSL connection. Both routers are set up as a DHCP servers dishing out addresses starting at 192.168.1.100 at the office and at 192.168.1.200 at home.

Current Status: I have switched the VPN server to a static internal IP address (192.168.1.125), forwarded port 1723 there, and enabled PPTP pass-through. I can connect to the VPN through a dial-up connection on my laptop and access network resources by IP address, but not by name. I can’t browse at all.

Problems:

1) I can’t connect to the VPN through my DSL connection at home. I read in the FAQ section of this group that the problem could be with MTU but I fear that it might also be that both networks are in the same subnet.

I don’t know what this means, but a suggested IP scheme was to assign 192.168.1.XXX on the local LAN and IP addresses of 192.168.2.XXX on the remote LAN. I tried this at home, but still couldn’t get it to work (picture a monkey randomly pulling levers…) Both routers are set up as DHCP servers, and assign IP addresses starting with 192.168.1.XXX. (only the final portion of the address can be changed in setup.) Does this doom me to conflicting subnets?

I am happy to statically assign IP addresses on one or both networks, but I would like to have my laptop transparently establish wireless connections at home and the office as it does now, and I would like it to automatically handle guest computers (my girlfriend) that want to use our internet connection without a lot of configuration trauma. What is the best approach to this situation?


2) I can’t browse workgroup or network resources through VPN, nor can I access network resources other than those on the VPN server machine by name. I understand that this is due to name resolution issues.

A FAQ on this site suggested that I place “at least one W2K or XP system on each LAN segment, make it a WINS server, and be done with it.” I read elsewhere that WINS isn’t available in XP. My VPN server is on an XP pro machine but I couldn’t find any info in the XP help about setting up WINS. Is it possible to set it up XP Pro as a WINS server? Will this require a lot of expertise or maintenance?

I have also read that making the VPN server the “master browser” might help or that the “Host” file (presumably on the VPN server machine) can be modified to include resource names, or that “LMHost” can be modified on each machine to resolve name issues.

What is the best approach here? I am sketchy on the details/pros/cons of each. Any guidance in this area would be much appreciated since our software is customized with hard-coded resource NAMES and accessing resources by IP address is not really an acceptable workaround.

3) Finally, I noted elsewhere on the site that there are problems with port forwarding or PPTP pass-through on the WRT54G. The solution seemed quite complex. Since I am not using this router on the server side can I leave it alone, or might this be part of my problem?

Sorry for all the dumb questions, but have spent a day on this already, and a little knowledge beats a lot of experimentation. Thanks so much!

Steve

 

[ChicagoTechNet]

this is long post. let us figure out the first issue - can't connect to the VPN. what's the error code?

Robert Lin, MS-MVP, MCSE & CNE
Windows, Network, Internet, VPN, Routing and How to at

http://www.ms-mvps.com

 

[stevemayman]

I get a 721: The remote computer did not respond.

And here's a strange one... I was playing around with my settings at home and ended up losing my wireless internet gateway (no surprise here...) but after resetting the router and reinstalling it, I was able to attach to the VPN! (sort of)

Although the connection was reported, I couldn't do anything with it. I could access no network resources, even by pinging their IP addresses. The reported server IP address was 192.168.1.151 which is odd, since the router should (and I confirmed it...) be pointing to the VPN server at 192.168.1.125.

My guess is that the 151 was an address assigned by the DHCP of my router at home? The strange thing was that I couldn't even ping that 151 address!

Now that I am back in my office if I try to connect through my wireless connection (through the same wireless router that is the DHCP server and connects to the internet at the office) I get the 721 message again when I try to connect.

Again, if I disable the wireless connection and dial-in, I connect no problem and can ping all resources by number.

Finally, I have access to some sort of IP log that may contain juicy info that I can't make heads or tails out of. It is quite verbose, but I could post the portions containing a successful dial-up connection and a failed DSL/wireless connection if that would help.

Thanks!

Steve

 

[stevemayman]

One more thought: Could Internet Connection Sharing have anything to do with this? I read Microsoft KB article 309524 which states that "ICS in Windows XP allows services to be mapped to hosts on the internal network, so that requests coming from the internet and destined for a particular service will be redirected by Windows XP to the appropriate computer on the internal network." This looks and sounds like port forwarding on the router. Do you think that ICS and the router are in a power struggle for routing responsibilities? In other words, are both the router and ICS necessary or should I be using one or the other?

BTW, I followed the KB instructions but still no love.

Steve