Can establish VPN, but Remote Desktop wont work

[SugareeGD]

I need to set up people to work remotely from home. I am able to establish a VPN from home to the office network, but then I can't connect to my individual workstation using Remote Desktop Connection. I get this message:
"The client could not connect to the remote computer. Remote connections might not be enabled or the computer might be too busy to accept new connections. It is also possible that network problems are preventing your connection.
Please try again later, if the problem continues to occur, contact your administrator."

That happens no matter which workstation I try to reach from home. We CAN take control of each other's computers using Remote Desktop within the LAN/Office . . . it just won't work through a VPN. I have static IP addresses assigned to the workstations, and am 100% positive I'm using the correct IP address.

The computer at home is XP-Home, the workstations we're trying to access in the Office are XP-Pro SP2, and the server is Windows 2003 Server. The router is a couple years old, Linksys #NR041.

Before we got the W2003 Server, we had an NT server & were able to establish a VPN & use Remote Desktop without any problems. I don't know if the maybe it's a setting on the 2003 Server stopping this from working, or maybe a setting on XP-Pro SP2. Any suggestions?

 

[PCmad]

Couple of simple things came to mind reading your post. You might already have tried this. First the machines at work, double check that they have been setup to allow remote desktop sharing from any machine. If you have SP2 you need to make sure you enable remote desktop sharing through it. There is a tab in the security settings saying what programs are exceptions to being blocked make sure RDP is included as an exception so you can access. Assuming you are using a firewall at work, is there an exception or entry so these home machines will have access. From Home can you ping the router at work and the IP addresses of the work machines?

One thing I use to do in situations like this was to setup netmeeting although hidden away a bit in XP it is still there, see if that works. Just go to Start, Run type in conf and configure from there. Also use to use VNC as well. Not ideal solutions to your problems but maybe good enough for temporary workarounds.

Good Luck!