Help, Outlook VPN problem

[Ben]

I have a user that has been connecting from home using PPTP VPN
connection into our WIN2k server running Exchange 5.5. She has had no
trouble connecting to and retrieving her emails through Outlook XP.
Now, however after she connects to the VPN she opens up Outlook and
gets the message "Exchange Server Not Available". She can ping the
internal IP of the exchange server when she has the VPN connected and
download files off of shared drives on that machine. She also uses a
PPTP connection to connect to another companies server and can open a
seperate outlook profile and retrieve messages off of their server. I
can go to her house with my laptop and connect to the server fine and
open up her email on my laptop's outlook client. This setup had been
working fine for about 3 months and then one day she can no longer get
exchange to connect. I have tried removing and then reinstalling
outlook but still get the same problem. Any ideas are most
appreciated.

 

[Ross]

When you have connected to VPN, your client computer has two network
connections - one for Internet, the other is the virtual one for VPN tunnel.
Suppose the name of your Exchange Server is server1. What IP address can you
get when you ping server1? You would expect to get its internal IP (e.g.
172.16.1.1), but you probably get it public IP address. So, the traffic
would go to your Internet NIC.
To solve this problem, please change the NIC order from:
- right click on the My Network Places icon on your desktop and select
properties. this brings up the Network Connections window.

- from the menu, select Advanced->Advanced Settings...

- on the Adapters and Bindings tab, make sure the 'Connections:' order lists
the VPN adapters first (select the adapter and use the arrows to the right
to move them up or down).

It should work.
Ross