One of my clients cannot dial into our AD network and access resources

[Rod]

We have several customers who dial into our network and use some VB6
applications that we've written. (These applications run against SQL Server
2000. Our network is a Windows 2000 Active Directory network.) These
customers are using various Windows OS's, such as Windows 98SE, Windows NT
Workstation, Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional.

Most can dial into our network and get authenticated just fine. There is
one, however, who has been having considerable trouble being able to do so.
He has Windows XP Home Edition on a laptop and XP Professional on a desktop.
He was able to use our applications just fine, up until a month or so ago.

I have asked about this problem in the VB newsgroups, but I am beginning to
think that the problem is more fundamental. The user has allowed me to
borrow his desktop and I've got a RJ-11 cable connected to it, so that I can
test the dial-up. This time, after connecting to our network, I brought up
the command window on his XP Pro machine and try to do some things. I did a
IPCONFIG and found that it seems our WINS server and our DNS server. In the
dial-up adapter, DNS and IP is assigned dynamically. But if I try pinging
something like:

ping ourserver

it cannot find the server. However, if I specify the IP address like

ping 192.168.0.4 (I am making this IP address up; it isn't the IP address
of the server)

then it can find it just fine.

I have also noticed that I cannot map a drive to a network share at all on
his machine, whereas I can on other customers' machines.

One last thing. I don't know if this will have any bearing on the problem,
or not, but he uses AOL. He has AOL 8.0 installed on both his laptop and
desktop (I don't know if AOL 8.0 is the latest version or not).

So, the bottom line is, what could be causing these problems for this user?

Rod

 

[Stephen Harris]

We have several customers who dial into our network and use some VB6
applications that we've written. (These applications run against SQL Server
2000. Our network is a Windows 2000 Active Directory network.) These
customers are using various Windows OS's, such as Windows 98SE, Windows NT
Workstation, Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional.

Most can dial into our network and get authenticated just fine. There is
one, however, who has been having considerable trouble being able to do so.
He has Windows XP Home Edition on a laptop and XP Professional on a desktop.
He was able to use our applications just fine, up until a month or so ago.

I have asked about this problem in the VB newsgroups, but I am beginning to
think that the problem is more fundamental. The user has allowed me to
borrow his desktop and I've got a RJ-11 cable connected to it, so that I can
test the dial-up. This time, after connecting to our network, I brought up
the command window on his XP Pro machine and try to do some things. I did a
IPCONFIG and found that it seems our WINS server and our DNS server. In the
dial-up adapter, DNS and IP is assigned dynamically. But if I try pinging
something like:

ping ourserver

it cannot find the server. However, if I specify the IP address like

ping 192.168.0.4 (I am making this IP address up; it isn't the IP address
of the server)

then it can find it just fine.

I sort of remember this from school. Pinging the numeric Ip address
but not the name substitution points to a problem with the DNS
Domain Name Server lookup setting; my course was for win 2k server
and I recall there was a hosts file involved. This should point you in
the right direction since your DNS needs to be fixed in any case.

USE ONLY YOUR INTERNAL DNS SERVER THAT HOSTS YOUR AD ZONE
Stephen

 

[Rod]

Stephen,

You may be right, but why would dial-up work for some users, but not this
one customer? If it were a DNS issue, wouldn't it affect every dial-up
user?

Rod

 

[Rod]

I believe I have found the problem. The user has Norton Internet Security
2003 (or 2004, I am not sure which) installed. Once I disabled that, I was
able to reach the server.

Rod