Hi,
I have not attempted to ping the desktop and as for TCP port 3389, I
have forwarded that port in my Linksys router. Today at lunch I will
tunnell in and try to ping my office pc.
Forwarding the port 3389 on your router at home is required if you want to
access your _home_computer_ remotely. It has nothing to do with your
ability to RDP "out", such as accessing your office computer from home.
I suspect your problem lies with (or relates to) the VPN, but would need
more information about it to suggest a solution. Unfortunately, there are
many possible VPN configurations, each of which creates a completely
different scenario. I am going to throw out a couple guesses, but would
really need you to describe your VPN setup in as much detail as possible.
If you are using RDP over VPN, where the VPN must be connected before you
can connect via remote desktop, and this works without the router, but not
with it -- then I would suggest that your VPN only appears to connect with
the router, but the supposedly established tunnel actually doesn't work.
This is not uncommon, especially with IPSEC VPN implementations. Many
routers simply don't pass the protocols through correctly.
Another common problem is the same private address block on both ends, e.g.
the popular 192.168.1.x block (which, if I am not mistaken, is the Linksys
default) also used on the internal network in your office. The result is
broken routing and the fix would be to reconfigure your router to use a
different block, such as 192.168.2.x.
