I found the hard way that VPN WILL NOT WORK from a Windows XP SP2 box to a network running SME Server 6.01-1 in Server-only mode (with routers at both ends in between) if the SME user password contains punctuation characters.
Strong passwords are recommended to include a mix of lower and upper case alpha characters, digits, and punctuation. So (it happened) that two different users on the SME server tried to connect remotely from home via VPN. One (me) happened to have a relatively weak password (lower case plus digits) and the other a strong password (as defined above). I could connect, and he could not.
It took ages to work this out, since we initially assumed that the problem lay somewhere else - I have a router at home between my Windows machine and a cable modem; he has ADSL not cable, and also has a (different brand) of wireless router, but his Windows machine connects direct to his USB modem and the Internet, with the router behind the Windows machine to provide wireless networking and other cabled network connections ... and so on. We thought some other Windows and VPN parameters might have configured differently, but they didn't seem to be...
It wasn't until I tried making two different VPN connections from my home machine to the same SME Server that we found that I could connect with my own username and password, but couldn't connect using his from the same machine. In both cases we tried new connections created identically except for the username and pw.
Experiment with simpler passwords on his account pinned it down to the presence or absence of punctuation characters in his password. With punctuation, no connection; without it, it worked just fine.
Error messages from a failed connection were completely misleading -- 800 errors, 742 (PPTP couldn't negotiate common protocol at both ends), or sometimes getting as far as a 'Verifying user name and password' message then timing out.
Don't know why, but at least we have a working hypothesis, tested with punctuation &, !, and @ causing failure. Haven't tried others, but they may fail too.
John McC
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