SBS 2008 disappears from network after turning on VPN

[Spicedaddy]

I was at a small business yesterday, they want to be able to VPN into their office network. Here's what their network looks like:

DSL Modem-->Linksys wired router (192.168.1.1, doing DHCP with addresses 192.168.1.100-149, about 20 client computers)

The server is a Lenovo with SBS 2008 with a static IP at 192.168.1.180, basically just a file server with one accounting app running on it. Anyways, when I enable VPN through the SBS console, it's like the server disappears from the network. I could ping it by IP from one of the workstations, but couldn't access it by name. As soon as I disabled VPN from the console, the server was visible again...

Any ideas? I did some googling and saw others with the same problem recommending to go in the NIC's IP properties and enable "Register this connection's addresses in dns".

I'll be going back in a few days to look more closely at how it's setup. In case I can't find the problem, what would be a good VPN router for ~10 users?

 

[mikeyes]

I have seen this happen before with SBS software. One way around it is to install a second NIC in the server and use the second NIC for the VPN connection. I have not messed with SBS 2008 yet so I can't offer anything past that.

If you want to do the VPN in the router I would recommend the Cisco 881 router. It can be on the expensive side (compared to Linksys) but is far more capable. I have used the Cisco RVL200 a few times but its VPN client can only be used with an IE browser and the router has been flaky.

 

[Absolution75]

If SBS is the same as Server 2008,

It would likely be due to the fact that when you enable VPN, the server basically acts like a NAT router. When the server requests to be registers via netbios or whatever windows uses now, the pseudo NAT firewall prohibits decent communication.


See if you can disable the windows firewall & enable DMZ, if it works then, you have a firewall/NAT problem.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

I'll be going back in a few days to look more closely at how it's setup. In case I can't find the problem, what would be a good VPN router for ~10 users?

ASA5505 unless you are on a budget