I am setting up a VPN tunnel between two sites and as a newbie am having what I expect will be a simple problem to fix. I have a Surf SOHO at the remote site and Balance One at the main site. I have PepVPN running and it is connected. I can ping devices on the remote site, but cannot map drives. Using a simple Net Use command at a DOS prompt, I get “The network name cannot be found.” I get similar errors in Windows trying the normal Map Drive command.
I am using IP addresses, so it is not a DNS problem
Before setting up PepVPN, I could map drives on the Surf SOHO using the L2TP VPN
My Balance One is sitting behind a Verizon router, but is in the DMZ
I run Bitdefender, but it is not reporting anything being blocked
Just to be sure, I created inbound and outbound firewall rules to permit traffic between the two networks which have different IP schemes
I have toggled the “send all traffic to…” and that makes no difference
UPDATE:
I have eliminated the Fios router, so there is no more dual NAT. The Balance One is now the only router and the problem persists. It seems as if I may need to convert to a Layer 2 VPN setup (I suspect that would work), but I would prefer to be Layer 3 so I can turn it off when not needed.
I would be grateful for any thoughts you might have. Thanks!
This sounds like more of a windows issue to me, if you can ping/route all the way from client to client but cant map a drive its indicative to me of a host issue.
Do you have client firewalls disabled etc? Share enabled, relevant permissions assigned etc.
Changing it to layer 2 just puts you on the same segment so yes that should work but it should also work on layer 3 as you have now (I do it all the time)
I agree that it seems to be something on either end that is blocking the traffic, but can’t figure out what it is. I am trying to connect two Western Digital NAS devices so they can securely mirror each other. They may have some sort of internal fire wall, but the strange thing is that it works fine if I just establish an L2TP VPN session. That does not solve my mirroring problem though because it relies on a computer running to send the traffic so it cannot run automatically. My challenge now is to figure out what is different between the L2TP tunnel and the site-to-site PepVPN. Does that make sense?
So it works with an L2TP tunnel but with a PEPVPN it doesnt?
If thats the case do you have any extra firewall rules setup on either Peplink device, ie: so its only allowing certain traffic, so an ICMP/ping works but say CIFS/mapped drives wont.
No, I did not set up any rules, so the firewalls on both sides are using default settings. Unfortunately, I am now dead in the water until the weekend when I can reset the remote SOHO. I tried to set up the Layer 2 VPN just to see if that did anything different, but it failed to connect for some reason. In order to enable that, I had to disable remote user access and the L2TP tunnel, so now, i cannot access the router to go back (oops). I should have enabled WAN management to the router first.
I have a nearly identical issue to you. I’ve finally got the SURF SOHO remote box connecting to the Balance One at the main site, but I can’t get the Network Drives to reconnect at startup.
I’m not using a Layer 2 VPN setup right now, but will if I have to.
So, I got the Layer 2 VPN working. The trouble was simply with an uncoordinated Remote ID. I realized, however, that I would have to restructure my IP scheme, however, and that seemed like a non-starter for a long-term solution. I went back to the Layer 3 VPN and found that I could map to some directories on the remote NAS device after all. I cannot explain why this did not work before, but there you have it. I will need to play with this further, but it seems to be a credentials problem. It lets me connect to public “shares” but not to one in which I provide valid credentials. This is clearly a NAS problem and not a Peplink problem. I have not been able to map to my remote desktop yet, so that will take further trouble-shooting.