Tuesday, June 12, 2007

VMWare, Vista and VPNs are vividly vulgar

Well, I just upgraded to a new work laptop. It came with vista business and so far I'm duly impressed with Vista. All development at work is done inside virtual machines, using VMWare workstation 6. So far so good. I connected vista to our domain, loaded workstation 6, and connected my external drive.

No probs so far. I load up my VMs, and I'm back in business! I spend the rest of the day working, and head home.

And home is where the troubles began. I have a wireless network at home. No prob. I get vista connected, and can surf like normal. However, when I go to start up my VMs to check on work stuff, I can't connect to the VPN inside the VM (which is Windows XP). Hmmm. So I connect to the VPN through Vista. No problem. So I startup the VM again, and try to connect to the network. No can do. It will get an IP from my dhcp server, but not make it anywhere over the VPN.

So I turn on the Microsoft Firewall client in Vista. Still can't get anywhere in the Virtual Machine.

I eventually was able to have the VPN connected in Vista, and the vpn connecting in the Virtual machine, but it wouldn't authenticate that "nested" vpn connection.

Trying just about every combination, I finally gave up and went upstairs. It was there I happened to notice my lone network port in the wall of my bedroom. Hmmmm. It couldn't be that simple. I grabbed a network cable, plugged it in the laptop, and now I'm connected to the VPN, inside the Virtual Machine, working once again.

Bummer that I can't use wireless for it, but someone else may have the answer to that.

Mike

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

My problem is identical to yours - identical. Did you ever find a solution?

Mike said...

I had to plug an ethernet cable in the back, then load the Virtual Machine. Inside the VM, I created my VPN Connection, and at my work, we use Microsoft Firewall Client.

That ended up working for me. I did just find some settings in vista with regards to public/private nic card settings on the VMWare Virtual Nics, but I haven't tried it out again.