Server 2008 newbie VPN setup question/troubleshooting

[blin]

I have been trying for the past 2 weeks to setup a simple VPN connection.
The issue that I am having is that no matter what I do I cannot seem to access anything on my network nor access the internet through the VPN. I can connect, but that is about as far as I can seem to get it.

I was using server 2003 and using the incoming connection to VPN into my network which worked fine. However for some reason no matter what I do in server 2008 I can’t seem to get it to connect to the local network through the VPN.

The only thing I notice is that the VPN connection is giving me a weird Subnet mask of 255…255 instead of ..255.0 and there is no default gateway.

I guess my question is: What is the easiest way for me to setup this VPN server so that I can access resources on my local network or how do I resolve the not being able to access resources on my network.

[blin]

There are hardly any changes in this from 2003 to 2008. The no gateway thing probably means that you are using a Win 7 client, but it is not important. In XP it gave you the "received" IP as the gateway address.

A VPN is a simple point-to-point connection. Subnet masks and default gateways have no significance. What goes in one end comes out the other, like water through a pipe. Once you connect, the VPN connection is the default gateway for your machine and everything goes over the VPN link to the server.

The other thing about a VPN connection is that it does not behave like a network connction. When you access LAN machines, the VPN server acts as a proxy for you on the LAN. You do not contact to the machine directly as you do if you are actually on the LAN. In theory you should be able to contact any machine which the server can connect to. The server will connect to the LAN machine and relay the result to you.

The username and password which you use to make the connection are used only to set up the connection. The credentials offered when you try to use a share are the one's you used to do a local logon to the remote client. Can you see shares if you do a net view command? If you can, try mapping a share using net use, which will allow you to enter new credentials which are valid for the target machine.