New VPN setup

[Emily_L]

This was my first VPN setup, and I had some questions. I
was able to set up a site to site VPN connection between
two 2003 servers. I am going back soon, so hopefully
someone here can lend me some assistance.

I am not able to do a \\servername and see the shares in
either direction. But if I get the private address and do
a \\169.254.22.232 I am able to see the shares.
How can I "fix" this? Add my main DNS server to the VPN
connection properties in RRAS? Or do I need to use WINS?

I was just testing, so I left idle time at 5 minutes. It
disconnects as it should, but it sometime has trouble
reconnecting on demand for network traffic. Every time I
do a manual connect it works perfectly. I'm not sure
where to check further for this one. I may just set it
to be a persistent connection, but I have to check and
make sure that's OK.

Thanks much for any help you can provide!!!

Emily

 

[Bill Grant]

It will certainly be a DNS and/or WINS problem. But the 169.254 address
worries me. This is a non-routable APIPA address. To get a site to site
link working effectively, each site should be using one of the reserved
private IP address ranges. The demand-dial interfaces used by the connection
should have associated routes to the "other" site's IP subnet to allow the
sites to route. The WINS and/or DNS entries should only show the machines by
their private LAN IPs.

 

[Emily_L]

So I should be using something like 192.18.1.x at one
site, and 192.168.2.x at the other?
How do I set an IP address for the VPN link? I didn't see
an option for that anywhere.

Thanks,

Emily

 

[Bill Grant]

That is correct. The sites use their local private IP addresses, and
traffic is routed through the VPN link as if it was an IP router. The actual
connection gets an IP address when it connects in the same way that a
"dialup" type VPN client gets an IP address from the RRAS server. The
demand-dial interfaces also need to be able to get an IP address. If they
cannot get one from DHCP, they might acquire an APIPA address. This doesn't
really matter, but you can give them a static IP manually if they can't get
one from DHCP.