Cisco VPN

[Doog]

I have two physical network cards; one for the LAN and, one for the Internet connection. I also have a Cisco VPN connection to our head office in London. When we connect the VPN (using the Cisco client), it appears as another network card in Wingate.

I login to the VPN daily which creates this connection from the Wingate server to our London server. This allows us to synchronise certain folders between the two sites. From each PC that needs to get email (Outlook 2010) we then connect the a separate VPN connection. This means we have multiple VPN connections – one from each PC that needs email and from the Wingate PC for folder synchronisation.

The VPN connection isn’t too smart because it says it’s a 1Gb link and has its own DNS server. This means that when we connect to the VPN from Australia, the DNS starts to get served by the London DNS server at the other end of the VPN – this is very slow!

We can solve this by changing the local LAN parameters so that the DNS is served locally.

What I would like to do is set up one single connection from the Wingate PC via the Cisco VPN (using the Cisco VPN client) and all the other PCs then connect to a service on the Wingate PC without having to run a VPN on each PC. Is this possible?

[adrien]

Hi

It shouldn't be necessary to set up multiple VPNs back to your London office, you should be able to pipe all your client comms over the single VPN connection.

I'm not too familiar with the Cisco VPN client, but does it have a mode where you can use it to join a whole network to a remote network, rather than just a single computer?

If not, you should still be able to use WinGate to proxy or NAT from the LAN to servers across the VPN.

Regards

Adrien

[Doog]

I use a Cisco VPN desktop client to connect. It simply creates a new network connection between the local computer and the London server. This new connection appears as another NIC in Wingate. It has no functionality to multiple PCs, I was hoping that Wingate would allow me to do this.

The Wingate server’s internal NIC has 10.0.0.2 bound to it and the external NIC is 192.168.0.2. The Cisco adapter assumes an address in the range 192.168.39.12 – 192.168.39.254.

What I was expecting to do is connect from a local PC through Wingate to the remote server, for example:
10.0.0.3 -> 10.0.0.2 -> 192.168.39.11

When I ping 192.168.39.11 from the Wingate server (with the VPN connected) I get a response. When I do the same from a PC, I get no response. I have tried to add a route (route add) to 10.0.0.2 but that makes no difference.