My VPN adventure

I rarely work from home, but today I had to take care of a sick dog. My 13 year old lab came back from the hospital after a case of HGE. I stayed to keep an eye on her.

The LAN at work is a bunch of Windows boxes behind a Sonicwall firewall. I installed the Sonicwall VPN client on a couple of old laptops I have, with mixed results. Both machines were able to bring up remote desktops, but only once. Every subsequent attempt failed. No clue why. One of the laptops runs W2K, the other XP home edition. My hunch is that XP Pro would have worked. The problem was with the remote desktop software. The VPN connection was fine, since I was able to get into the Sonicwall (where I have admin rights) by its internal web interface.

I decided to try getting a remote desktop using my Powerbook. First I downloaded a free VPN client called IPSecuritas. I configured it using the settings described in this forum posting. Of course, I had to authenticate with the firewall using a password. I just dug around inside the Sonicwall until I found the password. Most people won’t have that option.

I downloaded the free Microsoft remote desktop software for the Mac, and everything was golden. IPSecuritas worked like a champ. A rock solid connection. Tags: Sonicwall, VPN, Mac, OS X 10.4.5

Posted on March 22nd, 2006 by pwyll
Filed under: General

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