Topic: VPN & XP - Username invalid?

[John Alamo]

Hi everyone.. i am trying to setup a VPN between my SME 5.5 box and a WinXP Home client.

I enabled PPTP via the SME server-manager (tried 1 and 5 connections)
In WinXP I went through the wizard to enable a PPTP connection

When I connect to the SME box from XP, it tries logging in, but comes back with the following:

Verifying username and password ...

Error 691: Access was denied because the username and/or password was invalid on the domain.


I tried changing the workgroup on the XP box w/o luck. I've tried a variety of user accounts on the SME server -- admin & general user accounts and nothing. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[Bill Talcott]

Make sure you're using a correct SME username and password. Also, there are quite a few encryption and authentication options in the VPN connection, some of which are proprietary MS things. You may need to fiddle with enabling/disabling some of these options to get the connection to work. I don't remember what you do and don't need, so I can't help much more than that right now...

One other thing is software firewalls. I've had some block VPN connections, even after closing the program. It wouldn't work right until the firewall was completely uninstalled. If you're running ZoneAlarm or something, that could be another issue...

[John Alamo]

It ended up being a username/password issue .. but it is strange -->

i looked at /etc/ppp/chap-secrets and noticed it was using &/etc/smbpasswd for the password .. all of the user accounts were listed in chap-secrets..

so I looked at smbpasswd --- only 4 accounts were listed!

very strange ... in anycase, I used one of the accounts that was listed in smbpasswd for my test and it worked fine (Though extremely slow for some reason..) -- so i need to find a way to update the smbpasswd file to list all accounts..

[Bill Talcott]

Hmmm, I don't know why it would do that. I don't know if you can do something to make the SME reprocess that file. At worst, I'd think that modifying each user's account details, then saving it again would fix it. It might even fix everyone after doing just one, depending on how it builds the files.