VPN server with a dial-up adapter

Markie

Hi all.

I am having some troubles setting up a VPN server that will be using a wireless USB broadband device (Im talking about wireless internet here, as in the one that utilises the mobile phone infrastructure).

In case you didnt know, these devices configure themselves as PPP adapters (just the same as dial-up modem devices).

However, when I start up the Routing and Remote Access Service (and configure it as a VPN server), I cannot see any reference to the dial-up adapter.

When I go to the properties of "Network Interfaces", the following interfaces are listed:

- Loopback
- Local Area Connection
- Internal

As you can see, the usb modem (wireless broadband) connection is not listed.

Just to give you a bit of background here, the basic setup will be several VPN clients (on wired ADSL connections) connecting to a VPN server (on the wireless broadband). Unfortunately, there is no way around this because the location of the VPN server has no wired capabilities. All clients and the server are geographically seperated.

I have spoken to my ISP and they have said that such a setup should be possible (although technically it is not supported).

Has anyone had any luck using a dial-up adapter to accept incoming vpn connections to the VPN server? If so, why am I not seeing the wireless mobile broadband connection listed in RRAS.

There seems to be very little documentation on this subject. Some people have suggested to remove the device out of the dial-adapters section (by possibly disabling certain services such as the 'telephony' service). Apparantly dial-up adapters cannot be configured in both the "network devices" section and in "RRAS".

Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

meadIT

I haven't tried setting up VPN access it, but I have a Verizon USB (Cellular) modem that I use for my home internet. I ran into a problem similar to what you're having when I tried to set up internet sharing using RRAS. It would not allow me to specify it as the external interface. My solution was to use a cellular router: CTR350 Mobile Broadband Router | Cradlepoint Technology

This allowed me to use the local network adapter as the external interface. You could probably use something like this to set up the VPN access. Have the router to port forward incoming connections to the server's IP address, then on the RRAS setup, you would just have your external NIC as the incoming VPN interface.

Edit: I see that they now have a router that has VPN built in: http://www.cradlepoint.com/products/mbr1100-mobile-broadband-n-3g4g-router-vpn

Markie

Thankyou for the suggestion.

However, at this stage, I would prefer to not add anymore devices to the equation if it can be avoided.

I suppose at the end of the day, I am also using this as a learning experience to see just how capable Server 2003 is acting as a router/vpn server.

I suppose my main question here is: Can you specify a dial-up adapter (cellular modem) as the incoming VPN interface?