Windows 7: VPN Help required

I have a Draytek 2820n modem/router set up to accept VPN connections. I have three PC's at home connected to this router. I also have a laptop that I connect wirelessly to it. All are working fine with 100% connections.

Now I want to be able to use the laptop remotely and access my drives when I am away from home. I set the Draytek up to accept VPN connections.
I am using the Draytek SmartVPN Client on the laptop. I took the laptop to my sisters place and connected wirelessly to the internet. All fine so far. I then created a VPN connection to my home router using PPTP and it connected fine and is showing up in the Network control panel. I then tried pinging my PC's at home and all three responded to the pings.

The problem is connecting to the drives. It just will not allow any connections to the drives at all. I even used net use z: \\pcname\e and net use z: \\192.168.0.7\e and it just timed out.

Looking at the properties it says it does not have internet access but there seems no way to enable this.

Any help appreciated for a much frustrated person

John Veldthuis

Welcome to Seven Forums!

This sounds like a firewall problem somewhere. By some chance have you tried in any other remote locations beside your sister's house?

How does Windows 7 classify the network? Home, Public? Unknown? This relates to how Windows 7 sets the firewall.

Also take a look at the output of the ipconfig all command. Look at the tunnel and see if it has a DNS address assigned.

Do you use Homegroups at all? If not you can disable IPV6 so it doesn't get in the way.

Windows clasified it as a Home after I changed it. Dont use Homegroups and the IPV6 is not enabled for that connection anyway.
It should not need an DNS assigned to it because it is not doing lookups. I am using the IP addresses of the PC's then selves. The ping is going through fine so if the ping goes thru most other things should. The machine at home 2 XP machines and 1 Vista. Windows 7 on the laptop only.

The reason I asked about DNS is I noticed you used the name of a machine in one of your net use commands.

I'm wondering if your sisters router is having some trouble passing either GRE or port 1723 traffic.

Windows 7 does have some sensitivities with wireless routers. You may want to double check the firmware on her router to make sure it's the latest. What make and model is it?

Hi John, so you can actually ping to your PCs at home when abroad?

This is a good sign if you want to connect to the shares. How have you created the shares? Can you give details of what you did.

Well it is actually just several blocks down the road but yes it should work anywhere in the world theoretically. The computers just have normal shares of the drives. Thus from the laptop I should be able to just map to the drive through the VPN as though it was an internal network. It just is not happening.
The VPN tunnel appears to be there and working as evidenced by the responses to the ping. Just can't access the shares.

Ok then what's the error you got? and how did you try connecting to the shares (from where to where etc).

The more tdetails you provide the quicker we can get this solved (i hope).

There error message was that the computer could not be found. There was no error number given. The PC's do not show up in network neighbourhood and I tried mapping the drives as I said in my first message with NET USE. This times out with the computer unable to be found.

What version of Windows 7 are you using? Home, Ultimate? Also, can you map the drive ok at home using the net use command? There's a difference between sharing a drive on a local network vs mapping a drive remotely.

Something else to look at: Is there a way to tell the VPN client NOT to use the default gateway on the remote network? I found some sources that refer to that as one issue that will prevent drives from being mapped.

Ping acurasd, he should be able to help with this VPN issue. I didn't know that you wanted to VPN from abroad.