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Is VPN for me?

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Cogen

Cogen

Programmer
Feb 12, 2003
76
CA
I've done a little looking into VPN, however I'm still not positive if it's what I want to do, or if there is something better.
My company has 3 small offices, and I have a Windows2000 server in my office. What I would like is to have some public folders on the server so that people in other offices can login and read/write files (my office has a static IP). They will only need to access the server, not the computers that are on the network with the server.
From what I understand VPN will be hard to setup with my network, since the router hands out all of the IP's on the office network and the server doesn't even have DHCP enabled.
Is VPN good for my situation, or does anyone have a better solution?
 
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You can use VPN. In the setup, you will have a static range of IP's for the server to hand out to VPN clients. And you will need to forward port 1723 for PPTP VPN to your server...

Thanks,

Matt Wray
MCSE, MCSA, MCP, CCNA

 
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VPN probably is your best bet, and not really that difficult. See , you should not need anything after the "Configuring User Accounts" section.

As mattwray stated, the DHCP server on the router will not cause a problem, best to assign a static group of addresses to the VPN server as shown on the web page listed above. You will need to exclude these from the DHCP pool used by the router. If you are sure that you will never need to give the VPN clients access to the other computers (or printers) on Server network, you could even use a block of addresses not in the same network as your office network. If your office network uses 192.168.1.xxx, you could use 192.168.2.xxx for the VPN.

Another note along that same line, each of your locations needs to be using a different network address. If your main office is using 192.168.1.xxx, the remotes could not use the same.

Make sure your router will support a pptp VPN connection. If you aren't sure, post your model number. Should also make sure you have the most current firmware, check the manufacturer's web site. You will need to forward TCP port 1723 to the server as stated above. Depending upon the router, you may also need to enable pptp passthrough. Many newer routers have this enabled by default.

Not nearly as bad as it sounds.
 
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Thank you very much for the help guys ...

mhkwood .. I followed the web page steps as you suggested, but there are a few things I still am unsure of. After completing the last step, I get the popup message "Relaying and Remote Access - To support the relaying of DHCP messages from remote access clients, you must configure the properties of the DHCP Relay Agent with the IP address of your DHCP server".
I'm also not sure whether my router supports the features you mentioned. It's an Ovislink ov711c ADSL Modem/Router.
I'm going to look into the above issues that I'm unsure about, but if you happen to know any information that would help me out, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks again.
 
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I'm also unsure why, but since configuring Routing and Remote access, the server does not seem to connect properly to the network. Clients cannot ping the server, and the server cannot ping anything except itself (even the router).
 
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Thanks for the reply mattwray, but do I need to use an internal and external nic?
The server does actually have 2 nics, but right now I'm only using one of them. I have the dsl modem/router going to a switch, and the server plus all of the clients are plugged into that switch. Nothing is plugged into the servers second nic card.
 
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Okay, I am totally lost now. Unfortunately I don't even know if it's my software or hardware setup that's causing the problem.
I can disable Routing Remote Access, and the server works fine (I can ping the router and clients), but once I reset routing and remote access, the server becomes isolated again. The way the networks hardware is setup is in the above post. Please help.
 
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Do you have the second NIC disabled? If not I would disable it then set up RRAS. And only set it up for remote access server...

Thanks,

Matt Wray
MCSE, MCSA, MCP, CCNA

 
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