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VPN almost working - have TCP/IP, but no file shares

I've got a Linksys BEFVP41 VPN box at home, and am running SafeNet SoftRemote on my laptop. The home network behind the VPN has a couple of printers, a Tivo running TivoWeb, and a Linux file server running Samba. The Linux box is also the WINS server for the home network.

I've finally gotten TCP/IP connectivity to work beautifully - sitting at a coffee shop I'm able to ping everything, scan & print to the HP multifunction printer, use VNC to connect to the Linux desktop and see what the Tivo recorded last night (more "Mythbusters", hooray! :-)

What I CAN'T do, though, is access any of the file shares on the Linux box - NET VIEW says there are no entries in the list, NET VIEW \\\\SERVERXYZ comes up with error 53 "network path was not found". This works fine at home, it's just failing on the VPN.

On the laptop, I've tried disabling ZoneAlarm (didn't work) and added the server to the LMHOSTS file (also didn't work, but I didn't reboot .... HOSTS doesn't require it, didn't know if LMHOSTS did or not).

On the laptop within SoftRemote I've tried requiring the virtual adapter. Not only did that not work, it also caused all other TCP/IP traffic to the home VPN to fail - seems it was giving me my requested local address but with a mask of 255.255.255.255 so I could only talk to myself.

On the Linksys general filters page, the "Block WAN Request", "Multicast Pass Through", "IPSec Pass Through" and "PPTP Pass Through" settings are all enabled. Ports 137-139 are UDP filtered (disabling the filtering doesn't seem to help). On the specific VPN settings, NetBIOS broadcast is enabled.

Any recommendations on getting the filesharing working across the VPN? I feel like I must be missing something very obvious here ...

Thanks!

-- Chris ________*________ Chris Barnabo, snipped-for-privacy@spagnet.com ____________ \\_______________/

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\\__________/ / / __\\ \\_______/ /__ "The heck with the Prime Directive, \\_______________/(- let's destroy something!"

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Chris Barnabo
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NET VIEW \\\\ipaddress doesn't work either ... same 53 error. So I don't believe it's (only) a name resolution issue.

PING servername does work.

-- Chris ________*________ Chris Barnabo, snipped-for-privacy@spagnet.com ____________ \\_______________/

formatting link
\\__________/ / / __\\ \\_______/ /__ "The heck with the Prime Directive, \\_______________/(- let's destroy something!"

Reply to
Chris Barnabo

It's all in the timing ... I tried all the right things, just not at the same time. ;-)

The solution (for anyone else who might be having this problem) was:

1) Added LMHOSTS file on the remote laptop that points back to the file server. 2) Corrected permissions in Zone Alarm. Apparently, even when ZA is set to trust the network (which I wouldn't recommend in a coffee shop!) it was still blocking the NETBIOS traffic. I was able to defeat this by defining an expert rule allowing all traffic to the 192.168.1.0 subnet from any source. Even with the network set back to internet zone, sharing is working with this rule in effect.

Network shares are working by IP or by name. One thing that ISN'T working is browsing (i.e. "NET VIEW" says "list of servers for this workgroup isn't currently available") so I suspect I've still got WINS or master browser issues to resolve. But "NET VIEW \\\\servername" does work, and I can live with that until I resolve the other issues.

-- Chris ________*________ Chris Barnabo, snipped-for-privacy@spagnet.com ____________ \\_______________/

formatting link
\\__________/ / / __\\ \\_______/ /__ "The heck with the Prime Directive, \\_______________/(- let's destroy something!"

Reply to
Chris Barnabo

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