2 Home Office VPN's

[jonasro]

The attached has baffled me over this past weekend, so I'm relying on the braintrust in this forum for assistance.

I have a home office network that consists of a Compaq M700 Laptop (running W2K Pro) and a Compaq Presario 5000 series mini-tower (running Windows ME). They are connected through a SOHOware 4port hub to a Cisco 675 router, running DSL from Qwest. The 675 modem/router is set up for PPTP.

The problem is that I have two people here working from home and trying to connect to two different VPN's at the same time. I have no trouble with running a VPN on the laptop, however cannot get VPN running consistently on the mini tower. I have gone over all the instructions for getting VPN to work on the ME OS, however sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. The real kicker is that when I do get it to work on the ME OS, VPN stops working on the W2K OS.

I'm thinking that it might be the SOHOware hub that is the problem and I have ordered a Linksys DSL router, hoping that that might make a difference.

Any suggestions?

[r-simpson]

The symptoms almost sound like you are sharing an IP address for both machines with your DSL provider. If you are using NAT overload of some sort, only the first tunnel built will work. Take a look at your router configuration and talk to your SP to make sure each machine has it’s own IP address.

[r.fox]

If you're using NAT then the LinkSys DSL Router will not work either. LinkSys has specifically stated that none of their products will resolve this problem. Either get two unique IP addresses or look at something a little higher end for your firewall. A Linux-based proxy seems to work quite well.

[sstaker]

Instead of replacing your router and hub, you may want to consider using a firewall to the the VPN's, it may end up being more cost effective and easier to setup. Take a look at the PIX-506, it would probably be less expensive than replacing the router, software, hub, etc.

Just a thought...