I’ve been trying to connect a satellite office to our main via VPN this week, and so far, it hasn’t produced a lot of results. Right now, we have a Netscreen VPN set up so that there is IPSec client software on everyone’s laptop, which they activate to get a connection from wherever they are.
The problem is that if there are two or more people trying to use it from the same location, it doesn’t work. Now that our satellite office is growing, we sometimes can have three people there at once, and they all need access.
I bought a Linksys BEFVP41 router with the hopes of using its built-in VPN client to serve as an endpoint to the users that would connect behind it. In theory, this should work, but I don’t live in theory and the reality of the situation is that I can’t get any kind of response at all from any of my connection attempts. The router sents out a Phase 1 initialization packet, but the main office apparently never gets it, and therefore never responds. Where does it go? I can’t tell.
I’ve been banging my head against the wall all week on this one, setting up the Linksys at my house to test. There are just so many factors that can throw a wrench in the works. The satellite office is on a dynamic IP (as is my house), so I signed up with a DDNS service to keep at least the hostname static. Of course, the router firmware is fighting me on that one, but I placed a service request with Linksys to try to remedy that.
In the meantime, I spend all my time at work researching and trying to find that one miracle internet post that will finally make things click into place, and then go home every night to test what I’ve discovered. It’s very tiring, but it has to work eventually, right? Meanwhile, I’m miserable.
The only good news is that half day Fridays start this week. Unfortunately, I’ll probably have to spend this first one here, as I have a lot of off-hours server business to take care of.
Doesn’t really matter, it’s just going to rain anyways.