VPN tech support?

[MR.CJ-7]

Anybody reading this a guru on VPN setup? how about VPN mac client and xp host?

I have my desktop pc at home setup as a vpn server (XP pro). I can connect to it and file share from other pc's. The other day I tried to VPN from my mac laptop while at the office. I was able to connect to it just fine(according to the icon and status indicator), but my IP never changed like it does when I VPN from office pc's (i.e. my mac still had my office IP address not my home IP). I couldn't see my home PC as a shared system in finder on my mac, just all of the office systems.

I thought maybe I wasn't really connected to my vpn so I went to a pc in the office and did a remote desktop to my home pc, checked the network connections and sure enough my mac was connected to it.

Do I need to map a drive or folder like I did for the windows clients (run \\192.xxx.x.xx\my documents) I tried "connect to server" from the finder in mac, but it failed to connect.

I was thinking that since the external IP address didn't change that I wasn't really connected to my home network, but I can't explain why I saw my lappy as connected under "incoming connections"

Any ideas?

 

[Caleb]

Yes, you will need to map a drive, however on a Mac AFP is the default protocol so you will have to specify smb unless you have Mac sharing enabled (I suggest against MS's Mac sharing, it's old and antiquated). So you would use (from your example) smb://192.xxx.x.xx/my documents or smb://server/share, you can connect to smb://server and you should see all the shares that are available to you.

An easy way to tell if you are connected correctly is, can you ping your home machine when you connect? Also, if you look in your Network Preferences, you should have a VPN connection in there for your VPN. When you are connected, that is where your IP for the VPN will be, you will still have an IP for the network you are on on your ethernet/wifi port. It should be doing split tunneling, so most everything still goes to your local network but IP's that are for the VPN network will be routed to it. This way you are diverting all your internet traffic, etc over your VPN. Hope this makes sense.

 

[MR.CJ-7]

ok that does make sense. I'll try it next time I take the mac to the office