Home router won't allow me to connect to office VPN wirelessly

Sounds like the firmware in the router can't handle VPN over the radio.

Is this an older model router (a year+) ? Perhaps there is a firmware upgrade for it. Linksys and D-link routers all had this problem when they first got in to these home units and firmware upgrades fixed everything fine.

Well I got it to work after messing around with the VPN client. In the tunnel properties you can either specify which card to use and it was defaulted to "Any Interface". Even though it should have worked for either wired or wireless (same machine, not both connected at same time except when I had to use wired), I had to specify the wireless card as the card to use. Strange that "Any Interface" doesn't really mean any interface apparently.

My wireless card is an internal Dell TrueMobile. As long as the wireless works, I'll just use that all the time to connect now. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

I have used Linksys and Dlink wireless routers with out-of-the box firmware for quite some time to connect via SonicWall, Nortel, Checkpoint, and Microsoft VPN clients.

Some other possible thoughts are that the wired IP address is set up in the DMZ on the router, or that the timing is just a little slow from wireless, and the VPN server has timing parameters set too tightly. That would have to be adjusted at the VPN server side.

Are you trying to connect both wireless and wired at the same time? Some routers only allow one VPN tunnel, although I haven't seen that problem.

Your NAT router is going to present all of the addresses on your private network as a single IP address to the internet, and do some port management to keep them differentiated internally. The Nortel server that I connect to makes note of "IPSec NAT Transversal: Active on port 10000" for the first connection. The VPN server might also be seeing a second attempt from the same IP address, and only allow one. Mine allows only two. Sometimes if I am having connection troubles (like a marginal wireless connection), I can get blocked from reconnecting for a little while because my reconnect is seen as a violation of the "only two" rule.

Is the wired connection that works the same machine? If not, can you rearrange connections and IP addresses to try the lowest IP address as wireless?

I would certainly update the firmware to the latest rev.

After installing the wireless card, removing and reinstalling the VPN client package might allow it to recognize all of the interfaces. Adding a card to an existing VPN system doesn't seem to work as reliably, even though it is set for "Any Interface".

From Belkin's product literature, available at , it looks like the 7230 is the first of their wireless boxes to advertise VPN pass-through. You'll probably need to replace the 6230 with something newer.