Hi all. I posted this in another forum a while ago and was wondering if anyone could help me on the matter. It's pretty long so please bear with me... A breif overview of the setup: The router is also the ADSL modem and is a Belkin 54g wireless unit (http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Merchant_Id=&Section_Id=201576&pcount=&Product_Id=158009&Section.Section_Path=%2FRoot%2FNetworking%2FWirelessNetworking%2F80211gWi%2E%2E%2Etworking%2F). Using a trial version of Microsoft Windows 2000 server for the VPN server, and Windows 2000/XP machines for clients. The VPN server/clients are set-up to use TCP/IP and not IPX/SPX as I found the latter protocols caused a few problems before I even got stated. If there are benefits from these I may try the once I have this up and running correctly. As the router performs the DHCP on the home LAN I have set the VPN to obtain and assign address from customised static IP address pool from 192.168.1.200 - 192.168.1.216 (just for ref. the router has the IP 192.168.1.1). I have also disabled multilink connections both at the VPN server end and the client end. This seemed to correct the problem of not being able to connect even when connected to the local network. On the VPN server side I have both PPTP and L2TP enabled and the clients are set to automatically negotiate which protocol they use when connecting (PPTP seems to be the preferred choice as discovered through a little experimentation). I have (for testing purposes) disabled the firewall on the router and even opened the ports 1723 as I believe these are used for VPN? I do have a static IP 195.137.*.* that is routed to an internal IP of 192.168.1.30. This is the server that hosts HTTP, FTP and hopefully VPN. Now the problem is that I can connect to the VPN over the LAN, but when using dial-up to the Internet I can't connect to the VPN through the public static IP. Any ideas? Thanks in advance. O

Try opening port 47; this is the port for GRE. GRE is the General Routing Encapsulation protocol that is used in conjunction with PPTP. Is there a firewall configured on your RRAS server??

Thanks for the advice royn. I did open port 47 on the router but still no joy. Just to confirm, there are no firewalls running on the router, server or any clients just until I can get this to work. Any other ideas? It all helps!

I would just buy a router that supports IPSEC or PPTP and VPN right to the router, not sure the trial ver of windows 2000 all fetures work

I've struggled with this one too, but I beat it and quite frankly I was surprised. I am running xp home edition sp2 on a laptop and an old computer that sits in the home office. We are separated by a Belkin F5D7231-4 router but I think this solution is generic. The Belkin only permits IPSEC, its seems only microsoft permit PPTP in my limited experience so the numb is there are four bits that have to be dealt with 1) set the incoming vpn on the receiving computer - this can be found easily elsewhere 2) set the vpn connection on the remote - simple but you have to ensure you take the L2TP option and not auto 3) set your router for forwarding: port 1701, UDP! to the fixed ip address of the computer you are trying to dial in to 4) follow the set of instructions at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q240262 for both computers! Make sure you set the ports the same and the same verification code - also take care to ensure you reverse the ip addresses on each i.e local on one is the remote on the other 5) double check point 4 and then you are there. They certainly don't make this easy! But its great now its working!!!!!!!!!! Let me know how you get on and if I can be of help. The odd thing I find is that all the literature on the hardware says you can achieve this and how great it is but boy do you have to dig deep (right down to registry level to make it work). I thought the problem was the router, but nope that does its job oh so fine! Cheerio J Try hard and sometimes make it work

Thanks for the tips J, only just seen your post! Think I'll give this a go tonight. I'll post the results. O