VPN / sharing help needed - or maybe I need to hire someone?

I found two articles here on VPN and on folders sharing and stepped through them exactly (several times now) to get a VPN set up between an office computer and a remote laptop. Both are Windows 7 machines.

I am able to connect into the office computer. I cannot get a mapped drive to work. This is for my boss, and I'm at the point where I may need to advise him to hire a network specialist based on what you guys can tell me. I tried everything, including turning off antivirus and firewall utilities on both machines. The router is forwarding both 1723 and GRE 47 on the office machine network.

Here is what ipconfig looks like on the remote computer when the PPP connection is made into the office computer:

Code:

 
PPP adapter Mike-Server:
   Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . :
   Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Mike-Server
   Physical Address. . . . . . . . . :
   DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : No
   Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
   IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.200(Preferred)
   Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.255
   Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . :
   DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1
   NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled

When I check the connection properties on the remote machine, this is what it looks like:




I have a folder set up on the office machine called "test" with a sharename of "test", and all the required permissions are correctly set up.

I have a remote connection set up, thus enabling the VPN, using the username "remote1" on the office machine. Like I said, the VPN connection is working, I can get connected.

I am *never* able to map a network drive using the typical \\mike-server\test syntax. Once, I got as far as it putting up a password dialog when I used IP addres like this: \\192.168.1.200\test -- but the username it wanted me to authenticate was "chris\remote1" -- which is putting the hostname of my laptop in there. There is no user on the office machine called "chris\remote1" and I wouldn't even know how to create one. There is a user called "mike-server\remote1", however.

So my questions:

1. Looking at the ipconfig and the connection status picture above, does that look right to you? It looks odd to me.

2. What am I missing? I have spend now 20 hours on this trying the simple task of getting a Windows 7 computer on one side of my town to connect to a Windows 7 computer on the other side of town at my office, and establish a simple mapped drive.

I'm not a total noob here, have done this many times under XP and Linux. On Linux, I had to bridge the adapters and used a private 10.x.x.x network -- which I don't see how to do under Windows 7.

Any help you can give me would be immensely appreciated. Like I said if I can't solve this I have to tell my boss to hire someone else, which is not a great thing to have to tell him...

This issue is talked about over at the TechNet forums but it seems that the fix is different depending on a few factors.

The links to other similar threads are on the right in the links, there seems to be many different ways to accomplish this and it looks to be a fairly common problem.

Drive mappings and VPN Question for Windows 7

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/...b-2d99b9d31109

Thanks. I got the IPv4 setting right now (I think) -- it says it has "internet" connectivity.

Found what I believe to be the root of the problem:

The router at the remote office sits at 192.168.1.1
The computer at the remote office has been assigned a static IP address of 192.168.1.200

When I dial in through the VPN, I get assigned IP address 192.168.1.5 (for example)

I can ping 192.168.1.1 and it comes back to me in two hops.
I cannot ping 192.168.1.200 -- it can't see or reach that machine.

Any idea why that remote computer, although IT is the one running the VPN, can't be reached?

chrisV2 said:

Thanks. I got the IPv4 setting right now (I think) -- it says it has "internet" connectivity.

Found what I believe to be the root of the problem:

The router at the remote office sits at 192.168.1.1
The computer at the remote office has been assigned a static IP address of 192.168.1.200

When I dial in through the VPN, I get assigned IP address 192.168.1.5 (for example)

I can ping 192.168.1.1 and it comes back to me in two hops.
I cannot ping 192.168.1.200 -- it can't see or reach that machine.

Any idea why that remote computer, although IT is the one running the VPN, can't be reached?

Are there any third party A/V's or firewalls involved here? You many need to configure them.

I thought you mentioned that you could connect to the target machine but could not access or create mapped drive shares.

right - I thought the fact that I was able to connect via VPN it meant that I was connecting to the target machine. However, the VPN connection looks like it is working yet I can't ping, tracert or map a shared drive from the target machine.

I removed all firewall and A/V from the equation, on both ends of the tunnel.

chrisV2 said:

right - I thought the fact that I was able to connect via VPN it meant that I was connecting to the target machine. However, the VPN connection looks like it is working yet I can't ping, tracert or map a shared drive from the target machine.

I removed all firewall and A/V from the equation, on both ends of the tunnel.

I'm not even sure which VPN client you are using but have you tried using Hamachi logmein?

holy crap...I lied. Windows firewall got turned back on somehow - got it to work now...Thanks!!

chrisV2 said:

holy crap...I lied. Windows firewall got turned back on somehow - got it to work now...Thanks!!

I would think it should be easy to create an exception for the VPN through the Windows firewall so you can leave it turned on.

I'm curious which VPN you were using?

Glad you have it working now.

I'm using the built-in VPN that comes with Windows 7.

If you don't mind, may I ask a related question -- at one point I turned off "require password for accessing shared folders" (in my multitude of experiments).

Since all computers on the office network are trusted, and the only way 'in' from the big bad internet is through this VPN (which has a strong password) -- is it ok to leave that shared folder password setting turned off?

chrisV2 said:

I'm using the built-in VPN that comes with Windows 7.

If you don't mind, may I ask a related question -- at one point I turned off "require password for accessing shared folders" (in my multitude of experiments).

Since all computers on the office network are trusted, and the only way 'in' from the big bad internet is through this VPN (which has a strong password) -- is it ok to leave that shared folder password setting turned off?

I wouldn't put too much faith in password protected sharing because it's functionality seems limited compared to the NTFS settings so it doesn't seem very reliable to me.