Setting up VPN Connections

[newbie1020]

I work for a small company and we don't have an IT dept. I relocated to AZ and we are trying to create a VPN connection between me and my work. We have 2 VPN routers in between us and we are connected now. The problem is i can't see to access the small external hardrive we have connected to the router in my office. i downloaded an IP scanner and i am able to see some of the IP addresses from my work but how do i know which one is the drive i want. help pls.

 

[TooOne21]

Look for the shared name...

 

[newbie1020]

it keeps telling me it can not be found.
my work has a vpn router and that storage device is connected directly to it. it's an external storage device. and i am directly connecting to my works vpn router via another vpn router.
when i try to map it...i see my works workgroup but it wont let me into it. does someone at my work have to do some vpn configurations in our server even though that storage device is directly connected to just the router?

 

[Rapidskies]

Someone at the home office should be able to get the ip address of the nas device by pinging its name. They can get the name of the nas device by looking at their drive mappings to it. Once you have the ip address of the nas device, map to it via its ip address. For example //192.168.1.10/share name.

It sounds like your vpn is working but you just don't have netbios flowing properly, going to it via ip should work.

 

[newbie1020]

at my work we are all networked just via workgroups. so everyone there is connected to each other w/ no DNS. Everyone is just under a workgroup and everyone is just plugged to a VPN router. I am tunnelling into that router via another VPN router. Since i'm connecting to their router via VPN does it mean i am still a member of their workgroup or not?

When i try to map the drives i select my network neighborhood to look for the folder in there and i see my workgroup but when i click into it nothing happens. it wont expand to show me the folders. Like it's saying i don't have access. what should someone there do so i can access it? I'm really sorry for the dumb questions....we don't have an IT dept. it's a small company.

Thanks for all the help

 

[blemoine]

here are some suggestions/ideas. your private address and the company private address need to be on a different subnet IE: yours=192.168.1.0 company=192.168.2.0 then you need to setup a WINS server at the company's site and have everyone in both places point to it. without the WINS server you can connect to a machine like this: \\192.168.1.10\share if you use this setup everything should work.

 

[Thoreau]

I'm actually working an issue very similar to this for a user in the company that I work for (also in AZ of all places, heh.. small world.)

Anyway, like some have already mentioned, the IP addresses of the machines involved, as well as the NAS device, would help a good bit in figuring this one out. Depending on the IP configurations in use, it may be necessary to assign an additional and static IP address to your home computer in order for it to be able to communicate with the NAS device.

Windows can do some funky things when any type of VPN connection is made available to it, although the router-to-router solution you have *should* have been able to smooth it out to some extent. It may be best to find out if the router at the office is able to accept VPN client connections from the built in VPN connection options in Windows XP. If that is possible, it would then assign your home machine an IP that is on the same network as the office, thus keeping things simple and, in theory, functional.