Odd Remote Desktop problem

[Guest]

I've just set someone up with an IPSEC VPN from her home to her office. She
can establish the VPN Tunnel and connect to her Office Desktop from home.
Now for the odd stuff. When she clicks any icon on her office desktop, she
gets the Broken Connection icon in the upper right hand corner of her screen.

More odd stuff, from my house, using the same VPN client, I can connect
remotely and have no problem accessing anything on her office desktop.

And yet more stuff, with the VPN Tunnel established, she cannot ping her
office desktop nor can I ping her from her office, although I can ping the
outside interface of her router.

I have to assume at this point that the problem is with her Asante router,
but I haven't been able to take it out of the picture yet. Connecting her pc
direstly to the cable modem doesn't seem to work, even after rebooting the
cable modem and pc.

Has anyone come across this before and found a solution?

TIA,
Ken

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I've just set someone up with an IPSEC VPN from her home to her office. She
can establish the VPN Tunnel and connect to her Office Desktop from home.
Now for the odd stuff. When she clicks any icon on her office desktop, she
gets the Broken Connection icon in the upper right hand corner of her screen.

More odd stuff, from my house, using the same VPN client, I can connect
remotely and have no problem accessing anything on her office desktop.

And yet more stuff, with the VPN Tunnel established, she cannot ping her
office desktop nor can I ping her from her office, although I can ping the
outside interface of her router.

I have to assume at this point that the problem is with her Asante router,
but I haven't been able to take it out of the picture yet. Connecting her pc
direstly to the cable modem doesn't seem to work, even after rebooting the
cable modem and pc.

Has anyone come across this before and found a solution?

TIA,
Ken

I suspect that this is a VPN problem, not a Remote Desktop
problem. You can confirm it in this way:
- Set up a tunnel on your router that directs port 3389 packets
to the Remote Desktop host machine (which must have a
fixed internal IP address).
- Run a Remote Desktop session directly, using this command
on the home PC:
mstsc /v:aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd
where aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd is the external IP address of your office.

 

[Guest]

Pegasus,

Thanks for your response. I do not have physical access to the remote pc,
but the host is on a network behind a SonicWALL TZ-170. I access several
other systems on that network using the same SonicWALL Global VPN Client. I
access it from multiple locations.

In this situation the tunnel is actually established, but I have a feeling
that the Asante Router is somehow interferring with the connection. IPSEC
Passthrough is enabled on the router, but Asante has some conflicting
information regarding whethter or not you can run a VPN tunnel through this
router.

I know this is an XP forum and my problem is almost certainly a networking
issue. I was hoping someone here would have run into a similar situation.

By the way, for testing purposes I would consider forwarding 3389 directly
to the host pc, but I would never set that up as a permenant configuration.

Thanks,
Ken