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Legacy Forums => Experienced User Forum => Topic started by: David_White on March 22, 2005, 11:18:37 AM

Title: VPN Client setup / Wins server?
Post by: David_White on March 22, 2005, 11:18:37 AM

Hi All,

I have an SME 6 server on a client site.  I can create a PPTP VPN to this box from a windows XP machine and log into it.  I can access files on this server if I search for the server name or address in windows explorer, but I can't see the network resources in My Network Places.  From doing some reading I think this is something to do with WINS?? Can anyone tell me how to set up the client and or server so my users can see the network shares, printers etc when logging in from a remote pc?

Not sure if it matters, but the server in question is NOT a domain controller.

Thanks in advance

Dave

Title: VPN Client setup / Wins server?
Post by: irian on March 22, 2005, 05:40:57 PM

Quote

but I can't see the network resources in My Network Places.

You should after a while. XP is kind of slow in finding this.
Another thing that I do is to manually run a batchfile that maps driveletters to the servershares.
This works great.
For printing you just need to have the printer installed on the client and if you send the job, it will work.

Another thing I sometimes do, is to disable the webclient service in Windows.

Title: VPN Client setup / Wins server?
Post by: David_White on March 22, 2005, 09:51:30 PM

Hmmm.  Left it logged in over night and I still can't see the network resources.  I can see other computers on the local network but not on the remote network.  I can map a drive to a network share - that works fine, but I want to set this up so it is very easy for the users -ie that it looks just like it does when they are physically in the office.  Any ideas anyone?

Title: VPN Client setup / Wins server?
Post by: Boris on March 22, 2005, 10:03:28 PM

On your client VPN connection config you can specify WINS server to be SME servers private address. This should help with name resolution. The same can be done with lmhosts file on clients workstation.
Also it is important to make sure that client and server use different private subnets. If your clients network behind firewall uses 192.168.0.0/24 , then servers private subnet should be 192.168.10.0/24 or similar.

Title: VPN Client setup / Wins server?
Post by: irian on March 23, 2005, 05:27:31 PM

Maybe a personal firewall configuration?

Title: VPN Client setup / Wins server?
Post by: paulmancan2 on March 26, 2005, 09:43:16 PM

I may be wrong. I am having huge problems with network neighborhood browsing myself.

But this is my idea. WINS does not in itself do anything for network neighborhood, all it does is make sure you can address a computer by hostname.

What drives network neighborhood is the browsing service, master browser and browse list.

Title: VPN Client setup / Wins server?
Post by: Boris on March 28, 2005, 09:45:31 PM

Quote from: "paulmancan2"

I may be wrong. I am having huge problems with network neighborhood browsing myself.

But this is my idea. WINS does not in itself do anything for network neighborhood, all it does is make sure you can address a computer by hostname.

What drives network neighborhood is the browsing service, master browser and browse list.

Its a bit of MS related discussion, but all the services (including master browser roles for each subnet) are registered with WINS if its enabled, wherefore using WINS helps to speed up network lookups from the different subnets. On the same subnet broadcast for name resolution is sufficient.

Title: VPN Client setup / Wins server?
Post by: irian on March 28, 2005, 11:15:20 PM

In a similar situation I disabled the webclient service in Windows.