Networks

I recently wanted to be able to use my laptop from on the road to access files on our server back home. At home, I use a Netscreen 5XT which supports hardware VPN and a mixture of Windows and Linux (Suse) boxes. What I wanted to be able to do is use the standard Microsoft Windows VPN client that's part of XP to connect to my system at home. What I needed was pptp (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol).

I decided to use Poptop which is the open-source pptp server that Suse supplied. I downloaded the latest version (currently 1.3.4) which was only available as source. The build was very easy. In this post I'll talk about how to setup PPTP on your host. I assume the host has ppp (point-to-point protocol) networking installed already. PPTP then provides the VPN protocol support used by the Microsoft client(s).

Here is a link to some background information on PPTP from Microsoft.

In this scenario the netscreen 5 ( ns5 ) is the mobile device that connects to the internet and gets a dynamic wan ip address. The Sonicwall (sw) is has a fixed IP address and is located at the main office.


We start by configuring the Sonicwall. The settings presented here are the ones that worked for me. You may find that other settings work. I suggest you start with these to get things going then tweak from there.


Here is a screen shot of the Sonicwall configuration.