Connecting to VPN

[stephen99]

Running Windows XP under VMware Fusion I can connect to my company VPN from home flawlessly. Now that I am on the road in China I have lost the ability to connect. I can still connect to the VPN from Mac OSX but not from Windows and I need to connect from Windows to access a particular website. When I attempt to make the connection it is successful in contacting the VPN address but it hangs while verifying the user name and password. It finally times out with a message that the remote computer failed to respond. Using this same user name and password under OSX works fine. Need help.

[dp_fusion]

Experiment with networking - try both bridged and NAT connections for the guest OS. My own experience is if the host can get a VPN connection it will pass the resulting connection to the guest but only if the guest is running NAT. Because some VPN environments disable local networking, this isn't always successful. In those cases I use the guest OS to make the VPN connection which allows my Mac to retain all local networking connectivity. There may also be some port blocking by your hosts in China and it's probably worth asking.

[stephen99]

Thanks for the reply dpfusion. I tried both NAT and bridged as you suggested but no joy. I think you are probably correct about port blocking. So my next question is how to change ports? Or is that possible at all?

[dp_fusion]

See if the info on this page is helpful: http://www.greghughes.net/rant/UseCiscoVPNClientOnTCP443Or80ToSolveConnectivityProblems.aspx

[stephen99]

Thanks dp. I passed this along to our IT guy. Sounds like we need a VPN Client package like Cisco. This morning I upgraded to 10.5.2 from the Apple site and tried to connect again to the corporate VPN. Amazingly it worked. Don't know if it was coincidence or not. I'll try again this evening and see what happens. Thanks for your help.