Hello Customers, If you are seeing errors while establishing VPN connection using Windows in-built VPN client,  you have reached the right place. This article will help you to easily troubleshoot some of the common VPN related errors. 1) Error Code...

Little Background: Microsoft RRAS server and VPN client supports PPTP, L2TP/IPSec, SSTP and IKEv2 based VPN connection. PPTP control path is over TCP and data path over GRE. L2TP tunnel traffic is carried over IPSec transport mode and IPSec protocol internally...

Hello all. There have been quite a few questions/posts on the technet forums about issues you folks have seen with Windows Vista VPN clients. So we thought we would come up with a post on the common configuration issues and some troubleshooting tips....

If you are running firewall infront of your RRAS server (i.e. between internet and RRAS) , then following are the relevant ports which needs to be opened on the firewall for VPN connectivity to be successful: a) PPTP tunnel based VPN uses TCP Port...

When you upgrade your computer from an older version of Windows to Windows® 7 or Windows Server® 2008 R2, your 3rd-party virtual private network (VPN) client programs might not work. As Windows evolves, sometimes changes to the underlying infrastructure...

In this blog, I will explain how SSTP based VPN tunnel works - i.e. the data flow during VPN connection coming up and how data transfer occurs. The flow to get VPN connection up looks like: 1) Client gets Internet connectivity and then establishes...

Hello Customers, In this post, I will go through the steps to configure to deploy RRAS as a VPN server. I will try to go through different configuration scenarios in order to point you to various configuration options in RRAS server role. However for...

'Routing and Remote Access' service that is available as part of Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003 and Longhorn server can be configured as a VPN Server with single Network Interface Card (NIC). This configuration is primarily used when there is...

Hello Customers, In this post, I will go through the steps to configure to deploy Network Policy Server (NPS) based RADIUS server to authenticate and authorize the remote access connections coming from RRAS based VPN server. I will try to go through different...

Hi All, Till Windows 2003, routing and remote access server (i.e. RRAS) and Windows firewall didn't co-exist. i.e. if one of the feature is enabled - other cannot be enabled. RRAS was having a version of Windows firewall called as "Basic Firewall"...

Hi Folks, I have seen a lot of IP addressing, NIC, NAT related queries in different newsgroups. This blog is aimed to give you a quick view on this. First the basics on IP address/routing on RRAS perspective: Broadly there are two set of machines...

By now, from all the other posts you might be aware of steps required to configure SSTP server to accept HTTPS connections. SSTP also supports being configured behind a SSL terminator (HTTP Reverse Proxy scenario). With this setup, a SSL terminator can...

Hello Friends, In my previous posting related to VPN tunnel selection , I discussed various scenarios in which you need to install a certificate on the VPN server. To summarize this requirement in a nutshell: except PPTP tunnel, for all the other tunnel...

Hello All, in this blog, I will discuss how to configure a "Network Load Balancing Cluster" of vpn servers to ensure high availability and scalability of vpn service. For information about "Network Load Balancing (NLB)" feature in "Windows Server 2008...

Hello Customers, In this blog, I will go through the steps to enable the following scenario: Let us say you have a bunch of remote application servers that should be exposed to Internet only after routing them via a central server (which does accounting...

Hello Folks, I am sure you must have experienced VPN reconnect – a new IKEv2 based VPN tunnel that is added in Windows 7 that allows automatic and seamless switchover of an active VPN connection when the underlying Internet interface (connection...

Hi Folks, Very soon Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 will be released and it is very exciting that beta version of these new operating system is available for public download. So, go ahead and start using it and provide your valuable feedback to...

Hi All, To all our beta testers who are trying out SSTP, first of all "many many thanks from my RRAS team". This post talks about how to debug failures specific to SSTP based VPN tunnel ( Note : I am not discussing all the error codes displayed...

Microsoft RRAS includes a stateless 5 tuple packet filter - also called as Inbound & Outbound packet filters (or static filters). These filters can be applied on any interface - public, private OR per PPP connection too or in other words - it can...

By now, all of you would be aware of what SSTP is and would also have got your questions answered in the FAQ column. We also saw in this blog , how to configure a SSTP client connection. In this post, let's quickly look at the steps required to configure...

Hi Folks, Our team member Samir Jain has posted a nice blog on how you should decide which tunnel to use/deploy for your scenario. The details for the same are given at which tunnel to use . In this blog, I would like to understand further on a...

Problem: Today, Microsoft VPN client can be configured in two ways as discussed in this article – a) in-built VPN client b) CM based VPN client. The first method requires end user to know the VPN settings and then create a VPN connection – which needs...

In Vista, following changes have been done in remote access from security perspective 1) All the weak crypto algorithms have been removed and new stronger crypto algorithms are added to VPN tunnels Let us take case by case – per tunnel basis...

When a VPN connection is established, by default, ‘Use default gateway on remote network’ checkbox is selected. When this checkbox is selected a new default route for the VPN Connection is added and the existing default route gets a higher metric. Result...

Are you interested in setting up your Windows based client OS (like Vista, Windows7) as VPN server (aka ‘Enabling Incoming Connections’)? I have seen some queries as where to find ‘Incoming Connection’ wizard in Vista and hence this post. The...