VPN & other problems

My client has a Desktop in the office and one at home plus a laptop with WLAN two linksys WAG54G's provide internet and wireless connection.

I have set up a vpn tunnel between the WAG54G's but cannot browse from desktop to desktop or from the laptop to the far end of the tunnel. Do I need to change XP's settings?

How do I make it seem to the client that there is one local network with 3 computers?

 

Browsing can be very difficult, if not impossible, with a VPN connection. This is particularly true when going through routers. At best you can rely on mapping directly to known shares.

 

I cannot find the desktop PC at the far end of the vpn by typing \\office\shareddocs or \\[ip address]\shareddocs into explorer address bar

 

Can you ping between the two sides of the VPN? You need to verify basic connectivity before moving up the IP stack.

 

Perhaps not much use to you but I had a similar problem with VPN not passing some network protocall, perhaps Netbios? The network had a linux/samba server so I used the remote announce feature. Linux wins again!

From http://us3.samba.org/samba/docs/man/smb.conf.5.html

remote announce (G)
This option allows you to setup nmbd(8)to periodically announce itself to arbitrary IP addresses with an arbitrary workgroup name.

This is useful if you want your Samba server to appear in a remote workgroup for which the normal browse propagation rules don't work. The remote workgroup can be anywhere that you can send IP packets to.

For example:

remote announce = 192.168.2.255/SERVERS 192.168.4.255/STAFF

the above line would cause nmbd to announce itself to the two given IP addresses using the given workgroup names. If you leave out the workgroup name then the one given in the workgroup parameter is used instead.

The IP addresses you choose would normally be the broadcast addresses of the remote networks, but can also be the IP addresses of known browse masters if your network config is that stable.

 

I can ping the outside of the local WAG54G router
MALCB's reply means little to me, this is an WinXP environment

 

Didn't think adding a Linux server was going to be a practicle solution for you but wanted to hear your response first.

Sound like you can't make a VPN network connection at all, let alone browse.

For instructions on how to set up the XP VPN Server, see:
http://www.onecomputerguy.com/networking/xp_vpn_server.htm

For instructions on how to set up the XP VPN Client, see:
http://www.onecomputerguy.com/networking/xp_vpn.htm

You may need to enter the LAN IP address of the server in your hosts and LMHOSTS files as well.

 

Many thanks, I see I need not have bought the WAG54G's