Connecting to Share Points through VPN

This may seem silly, but please go easy on this Newbie:

Thanks to the help of several of you in these forums I've finally got a VPN that I can connect to from client computers. The problem is that through Internet Connect I can see that I'm connect (for how long, etc.) but I can't actually mount or access any of the share points that I've created.

I have created a user named justin.
Clicked "Share this item and its contents"
Added justin to the Access Control List
Turned on AFP / and Allow AFP guest access
I've enabled Network mounting of this share point "Use for User Home Directories".

Yet when I logon as a client I don't see the server nor my specific user share point.

Could you please point me in the right direction?

Thanks Much!

~ JJL

Power Mac G5 Quad, 30" Cinema, Powerbook 17" G4, Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Posted on Mar 21, 2007 6:15 PM

Reply
5 replies

Mar 23, 2007 1:18 AM in response to J.J.L.

When I connect, I am connecting to 67..81.*.** which I presume is the server that I want to mount, yet I'm still unable to.

No.

When you connect to the VPN you're assigned an IP address in the internal/private network at the VPN server's location. It's probably using something like a 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x address.

It's the private address you need to enter. If you use the public address your connection wouldn't be secured, which negate the whole point of using the VPN in the first place.

Mar 23, 2007 9:27 AM in response to Camelot

Again, perhaps silly question:

When a client computer is connecting to my office VPN using the Mac OS X Internet Connect Dialogue Box, if I have it connect to 192.168.x.x isn't that just a common address that all routers share? Also, it asks for a single address to connect to, and since the internal/private network is served out using DHCP, with multiple addresses being served, how do I list a single address?

Thanks a lot!

~ JJL

Mar 24, 2007 2:09 PM in response to J.J.L.

> if I have it connect to 192.168.x.x isn't that just a common address that all routers share

No. 192.168.x.x. is what's known as a private class network - a special set of IP addresses that are not (normally) public - they're always local and usually behind some kind of gateway/router that uses NAT to translate the addresses into a real-world, public IP address.

That's why when you're at home your machine might have an internal address 192.169.1.2 but when you try to access a remote site, the router translates that address into the real-world public address assigned by your ISP, which is what the remote sites sees. When the remote site replies, the router remembers who initiated that connection and relays the response back to your machine.
In this way you can have multiple machines in your private 192.168.x.x network that all share a single public IP address.

>Also, it asks for a single address to connect to, and since the internal/private network is served out using DHCP, with multiple addresses being served, how do I list a single address?

I think you're getting confused with how the IP addresses on the VPN work.
In most cases your VPN server should have TWO addresses. A public address (let's say 65.43.2.1) and a private address (let's say 192.168.100.1).
In addition to that, the VPN server is told to reserve a block of additional IP addresses in the internal network to be used for VPN clients - let's say 192.168.100.101 through 192.168.10.110).

Now, when your client connects from home, you connect to the public address of the server (65.43.2.1). When the connection is established, the VPN server hands you one of the IP addresses from its pool (192.168.100.101 through 192.168.100.110), and it tells the client what address it's been assigned.

Now your client can try to hit anything on the 192.168.110.x network, including any printers, file servers, web sites, etc. in the internal network at the office. Your client will encrypt the connection and send it over the VPN where the VPN server will decrypt it and pass it on to the target server.

As far as the target server is concerned, the connection comes from the 192.168.100.x address assigned by the VPN server, so that's where it sends the reply, where the VPN server picks it up, encrypts it and sends it back down the tunnel.

That's the important part here. Because the VPN server assigns you an address in the internal network, all internal servers think you're local and know how to get traffic back to you. They don't know you're remote.

That's why you have to connect to the internal address of the server you're trying to connect to.

Now, as for the internal network using DHCP, that's the primary reason why you should always assign servers a STATIC IP address in the corporate network, so that you KNOW your file server is at 192.168.100.5, your printer is at 192.168.100.76 and your intranet web server is at 192.168.100.212 (or whatever). Of course, you should be using DNS to give this devices 'friendly' names that humans can remember, but the point is they should be static.

It's incrediably difficult to connect to a machine over the VPN if you don't know it's IP address/hostname, so don't waste your time trying to connect to a DHCP client. There are ways of doing it using DynamicDNS where the internal DNS server is tied to the DHCP server, so each time some device is handed an address from the DHCP server it updates the DNS tables, but it's non-trivial to setup.

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Connecting to Share Points through VPN

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