Need some VPN Help!

[Hutz4]

Hi,

I work in a very small office and we have a couple of people that would like to work from home time-to-time. Our office is running windows server 2003 and we have a VPN access set up through our D-link router. We are using a 3rd party software to run remote desktop between the client and the host computer. The client computer (home) and the host computer (office) are both running winxp home.

I have set up the router VPN and remote desktop solution and all works fine. The client computer can see the host computer and remotely control the host copmtuer from the client side.

The problem I have is that I want to print to a local printer (home) while connected to the remote (host) computer over the vpn. Users want to be connected to their office computer from home and print to their home (local) printer.

I know some 3rd party remote desktop solutions have this function built in, however, we are using Radmin for this...we found this to be the fastest solution.

Here is a brief description of the vpn setup:

the user from home logs into the vpn gateway 192.168.2.1 and obtains an ip address of 192.168.2.2 mask 255.255.255.255

All computers on our office network use 192.168.1.xx addresses with a mask of 255.255.255.0 and a dns of 192.168.1.100

The VPN is enabled and the PPTP server is enabled on our router (VPN is through router)

When the client computer is connected to the office vpn, I can ping the office computers and the office computer can ping the client computer. However, the client computer cannot see any of the shared folders on the office computers, it can just see our server, and the office computers can't see any of the shared folders on the client computer.

I was hoping you could just "share" the local printer and the office computers would be able to see it through the vpn when connected, however, this does not seem to work?

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions? Is it even possible to do what I am trying to do?

Thanks in advance.

Jeff

 

[tipstir]

You have a network issue there going on the other end of the tunnel with VPN. YOu don't use a ACE Server for VPN Secured ID card (token key, key fob) goes under many names) Again have you setup permissions for these users connecting to your local domain through Active Directory 2003?

 

[mikescorpio81]

The solution is simple (provided your VPN is working correctly):

When the users have connected their VPN and they are ready to remote in, in their mstsc RDP connection make the following configuration before connecting:

On the remote desktop connection dialogue box click OPTIONS. Select the LOCAL RESOURSES tab and then tick the Printers check box.

This will give them their local printers as an option to print to while remotely connected to another PC. You can also tick the Disk Drives option if they wish to save docs to their local PC.

Easy :grinthumb

 

[Hutz4]

Thanks for the reply tipstir and mikescorpio81, however, since most of our machines are running WinXP home, the native remote desktop is not available. That is why we are using Radmin for our Remote desktop solution.

There must be a way to allow the host computer to see the shared folders/printers on the client machine....the host computer can ping the client machine, and other computers on the office LAN can ping the client machine....but that is all we can do....we can't see the client computer or client computer shared folders/printers through the LAN (client computer's firewall is turned off).

Oh, ya,

forgot to mention (incase you couldn't make it out from the original description)..we are using our router's built-in VPN software for the VPN...not Terminal Server.

 

[tipstir]

There is a way around networking on the WHE, but you need third party freeware program called X-SETUP to create dummy well working account so that you can access networks (workgroups or domains).

user name:
password
domain:

Alot of the tweak programs can do this also. I did that when I had WHE running but got rid of it and put WPRO instead.

 

[mikescorpio81]

Thanks for the extra info.

Sorry but I can't really offer much more help with that as I am unfamiliar with the software. Go for XP Pro upgrades ... make life alot easier!

Cheers :grinthumb