Sharing PC names over OpenVPN connection

Hi there!

I have an OpenVPN connection set-up on my BR1 ENT for my client to connect outside the office. They are used to connectiong to other PCs in their office by the PC name on their old router due to them being DHCP. I have this working inside the office by turning on the WINS server, but my outside agents cannot.

I have tried both split tunnel and route all traffic. Either way, I get a “Cannot find host” error. Is there a setting somewhere that I can turn on for this to work?
DNS settings are showing up as the remote router. I tried add int dhcp DNS option below and that didn’t work either.

OVPN file:
client
dev tun
proto udp #only if you use udp protocol
remote 11.22.33.44 1194
remote 55.66.77.88 1194

remote-random
resolv-retry infinite
nobind
persist-key
persist-tun
auth-user-pass
verb 3
setenv CLIENT_CERT 0
remote-cert-tls server
tls-client
cipher AES-256-GCM
dhcp-option DNS 10.0.0.254

If you have enabled WINS then you could add that with

dhcp-option WINS 10.0.0.254

If you’re using DNS you’d need to add DNS entries to the BR1 manually. The WINS server listens to the local network requests and updates its database automatically.

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This seemed hopeful, but unfortunately didn’t work. I am still getting an unable to resolve host error.
I did check my IP settings, and the WINS server is showing up there. I have tried with both the split tunnel config and route all traffic config.

OK so lets just sanity check this.
If you go to Status WINS Clients do you see any entries?
What result do you get from a nblookup for one of those entries against the WINS server locally - do you get a returned record?
What do you get when running nblookup remotely?

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The Status > WINS Clients answered this. I only saw one server under there, and I can get to that one. I am having the client reboot their servers to get them re-registered with the WINS server, and hopefully that will finish fixing this. Thank you!

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Glad you worked it out. You don’t need to reboot the servers you can run NBTSTAT -RR which does a release and refresh against the WINS server if you prefer…

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