Vista and a remote network

[rrfd43]

I have a Vista question for you all. I work at three different fire stations that are networked together via a L2TP VPN across the public internet. Each house has a network plan such as

192.168.1.XXX (server 2003 is located here with needed network drive.)
192.168.2.XXX
192.168.3.XXX

When I am the main station (192.168.1.XXX) my mapped network drive to the server works fine. It validates my saved password and then allows me access (I am the administrator of the domain).

When I move to any of the other station and my dynamically assigned address is on one of these networks I cannot connect to the networked drive. It tells me the computer name is not valid. I cannot make a new mapped drive. Not any way can I get to it.

The computer the drive is on is seen in network. In fact I cannot connect to any computers seen in the network that have a different IP structure. I am able to ping this server with the drive, and I am also able to remote desktop to it.

I have shut down Symantec 11 firewall and all accessories to it, including windows firewall. None of these changes help.

My old xp pro machine linked fine with all the other equipment, Vista here seems to be blocked. Again it works fine on the same network structure, just does not work when on a different structure. Works fine everywhere in XP, not Vista. Additionally I can see any resourse on any computer with the same ip structure, just not on the extended VPN network. This worked fine in XP Pro, I just got to try and find what is causing the block with XP. I have adjusted all the private and public network settings, all the file sharing, etc on the vista machine.

What am I missing? I can’t get my data when I need it and it is a little annoying.

Thanks again.

[HumHead]

Are you able to reach the machines on the other subnet by IP address instead of machine name?

Do you know what protocol is being used to resolve the computer names? (NetBOIS, WINS, DNS, etc.?) I have managed to pretty thoroughly avoid Vista, but some name resolution schemes, like NetBIOS, will not normally cross subnets or VPN tunnels due to the broadcast traffic volume that would result.

If the number of machines on the network is relatively small and fixed, the easiest solution may just be to write a Hosts file and add it to each machine.

[rrfd43]

No, I can't reach them by any means. I can see them, ping them, remote desktop to them, but can't "click" on the through "network" where they show up. The 2003 server has a shared drive that mapped when at the same station as the server ( and worked quite fine), but when I moved to the other station the map did not work.

I'm not sure what is resolving the names, something quite different than XP!

Now host mapping, I have never done that, time for google to find out how......

Any other ideas?

[rrfd43]

Wooops, got it with the command \\ipaddress......

Found it. But why?

[sethcwilliams]

Like HumHead said before, a lot of your name resolution protocols are stripped out of WAN connections, VPNs, etc. to save bandwidth. Vista is ..... well.... Vista. It's natively a PITA. The thing to do might be to start the DNS server services on your Server 2003 box (if it's not already) and have your DHCP server at each site (assuming a router at each location) issue the Server 2003 box's IP address as the DNS server for each end user PC. Then your PCs will be able to locate the pointer record (PTR) for all the machines and resolve names to IPs. Another way is just like HumHead said, manually update host files on each machine. (C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc) Open the file named "hosts" with notepad, you'll see the following text:


# Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host

127.0.0.1 localhost

Add the following entries just below the above "localhost" address and match the ip address of your Server 2003 machine. Only do this for machines with static IP addresses, machines using DHCP will eventually change addresses and will no longer match your manual entry.

192.168.1.xxx SERVER-2003-PC
192.168.2.xxx STATION-2-PC

In notepad, make sure you select "SAVE" from the file menu. If you do a save as, Windows will automatically add a file extension to the "hosts" file and it will no longer work for name resolution.

Using DNS will allow you to find all machines regardless of the IP address they happen to pull, but manually updating the host file is an easy way to resolve your shared drive by "\\machinename\sharename".