VPN issue

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stand_58

I'm a new hire with an office at a site that's a few hundred miles from the
home office. My company "gave" me a laptop. I plugged the laptop into the
visitors' LAN at my office, logged in to the computer, logged into the
visitors' LAN with the password that our host company gave to all the people
from my company for use of the visitors' LAN, verified at that point that I
have good internet access, then fired up the Cisco VPN client preinstalled
on the laptop to reach into the domain provided by my company.

The VPN client connected to its IPsec server, asked for my password, went
through the security warning, and then it all stops and waits for me to try
to use the machine. When I try to open up a web page, I may as well have
removed the ethernet cable. Similarly, when I fire up Outlook, the exchange
server can't be found. The domain I'm trying to get into suddenly doesn't
exist. Using ipconfig shows that my DNS server is the same as the DNS
server provided to all my coworkers....but I can't get anywhere.

So I said to hell with it....and brought the machine home, plugged it into a
free port on the Microsoft wireless router, fired up the machine just as I'd
done when in my office, logged into the machine. The router immediately
assigned an IP address to the laptop, of course. Now I double clicked on
the VPN client and reach the same point as before, got a DNS server address
that's the same as the one I had when in the office. The difference is that
when the machine is going in through my home network ...router/cable
modem....I can open up and use Outlook, can reach my company's intranet.

In summary, the company supplied laptop reaches the company network via the
VPN client when I do it from home, but doesn't reach the company network via
the VPN client when I do it from the office where I'm resident. All my
colleagues can use their company supplied machines from the office to get to
our company's domain.

So the question, and it's a newbie question....where even if I knew the
answer maybe I couldn't do anything....is what's going on? If there's
something fishy about the visitors' LAN, why does it mess up only my
connections? Is there's anything I can look for to try to track down what
the problem is? I don't have a great deal of faith in my company's "help
desk". They're not in Bangalore, but since I'm offsite, I may as well be.

Thanks in advance.
 
This could be in the security configuration of the visitors LAN. Do you
other coworkers plug in to this as well/
 
That's part of the mystery, Rob. My colleagues all plug their laptops into
the visitors' LAN, (just like me). They go through a visitors' LAN login
page (just like me), they open and use their Cisco VPN dialer (just like
me), put in their usernames and passwords and SecurID information (just like
me), and all can get to the exchange server and the company intranet (except
for me).

I'm speculating that maybe a port that is supposed to be open isn't, but
then again I don't know what in the world I'm talking about.....to me it's a
miracle that any of this stuff works at all, ever.

Rob Elder, MVP-Networking wrote:
| | This could be in the security configuration of the visitors LAN.
| | Do you other coworkers plug in to this as well/
| |
| |
| | | | | I'm a new hire with an office at a site that's a few hundred
| | | miles from
| | the
| | | home office. My company "gave" me a laptop. I plugged the
| | | laptop into
| | the
<snip the rest of my stuff>
 
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