VPN in Fusion with wireless

[steve_hy]

Has anyone been able to get the current version of Fusion to work correctly with the native Microsoft VPN with a wireless connection (MacBook Pro AirPort), or is this just a function of this beta and assume it will be fixed when host networking for wireless is enabled in the future? Thanks.

Steve

[rcardona2k]

This is a known issue and I have beta support request SR#345988 open to track this issue. Here's a thread where you can read up on the prior discussion:

PPTP VPN not connecting through Fusion NAT

[steve_hy]

Thanks for the confirmation of the issue not being implemented properly in the current beta. I truly hope that the developers fix this quickly a without VPN its usefulness is quite limited for me. Thanks again.

Steve

[steve_hy]

Thanks for the confirmation of the issue not being implemented properly in the current beta. I truly hope that the developers fix this quickly a without VPN its usefulness is quite limited for me. Thanks again.

Steve

[rcardona2k]

I should note VPN access works fine in bridged networking mode. The problem with GRE packet forwarding only occurs with shared networking (NAT). Of course there's a bug with bridged networking that keeps it from working with wireless networking, so fix one thing only to run into another.

[rcardona2k]

Check out this workaround. It's not perfect but now I have a working VPN over a wireless connection:

<a href="http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=66365">HOWTO - Wireless networking hack</a>

[steve_hy]

Yes, you are correct in that you can get VPN over wireless working this way, but what a kludge ;-( I can't imagine doing this with over 100 different VPN connections while I am at the different client sites. Hope this gets fixed soon. The only way this works is as a proof of concept. Thanks again, it is appreciated.

Steve

[drewbiedoo]

This appears to be the case with the Nortel IPSEC client my company works as well, not just the MS PPTP stuff.

I built an XP vm with the nortel client in it. Bridged mode (ethernet), works. NAT does not (over wireless)

copied same xp vm to my other laptop (running windows xp, vmware workstation 5.5) vpn works in NAT or bridged mode.

Does the PPTP case include ipsec?

Drew

[rcardona2k]

>Does the PPTP case include ipsec?

It's more like the VPN case includes PPTP and IPSEC. While these protocols work differently, PPTP uses General Routing Encapsulation (GRE), IPSEC uses UDP port 500 for key negotiation and AH/ESP for the payload. Either one of these could be blocked. At a minimum you would need to port forward UDP 500 to your VM. I found this section in /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/nat.conf:

\[incomingudp]

\# UDP port forwarding example

#6000 = 172.16.226.128:6001

So you would need to add a line for port 500 to be forwarded to your Guest's port 500. Editing this file requires restarting Fusion networking script with "boot.sh --restart" in that same directory.

Some VPN vendors also have other proprietary ports that need to be open so I would be surprised if this alone worked, but it's worth trying.