I just recently purchased my first Peplink product, a Pepwave Surf SOHO and so far I am impressed. It was a breeze to setup. The UI is much better than a lot of the big box store router’s that I have used in the past, and it seems much more powerful. I was playing the the PPTP server in an effort to setup a VPN tunnel from my laptop at home to my workstation at the office where the Surf SOHO resides. It was no problem configuring Windows 8.1 on my laptop as a client. Everything connected as it should, but when I try to access my Windows 7 workstation at the office via the NetBIOS name, the NetBIOS name cannot be resolved. However, I have no problem accessing the workstation via the LAN IP address. Does anyone with more experience than I know if it is possible to resolve NetBIOS names over the VPN connection with a Surf SOHO, and if so, how?
Hi,
You may configure host name and IP Address into Local DNS Records (Network > Basic Settings > DNS Proxy Settings > Local DNS Records). Please ensure target device has fix IP.
So, I have to either have static IPs or DHCP reservations to resolve domain names over a VPN connection. This kind of defeats the purpose of not having to know the IP address. I know WINS is going the way of the dinosaurs, but is there a possibility that WINS server capabilities will be added to the Surf SOHO? This would probably solve my problem.
I did ast TK Liew suggested and added DHCP reservations for all of my client workstations and then added corresponding local DNS records using the workstation’s NetBIOS names. However, I still cannot access the workstations via the NetBIOS name and pinging the NetBIOS name fails. Again, it works fine via IP address as does pinging. However, when I do an nslookup of the NetBIOS name, it does display the correct LAN IP address, so the DNS proxy settings appear to be working. What am I missing?
I changed the hostname to my.hostname in the DNS proxy settings. Now everything is accessible via the DNS address \my.hostname via Windows. However, this was not my goal. I want to be able to access the machines via just \hostname (the NetBIOS name) over the VPN. Is this possible or not?
NetBIOS is a layer 2 protocol and it gets stripped across any routed layer 3 network.
Was this possible?! I am myself trying to do this. Thanks!
You can add the dns suffixes at the network adapter DNS level. There is an option to “append DNS suffix in order” in the advanced TCP settings. Domain joined machines populate this with the domain name. Everything should use some sort of suffix, even if it is .local.