[Cop Rock]

I'm attempting to use my Macs at home (G4 Cube and iBook both running OS X 10.2.4) to connect to my VPN at work and use Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection Client to access our servers. I'm able to use a PC at home without any problems.

A call this problem "bizarre" because I can get to some of our servers using the Remote Desktop app but not all of them. I've also tried connecting to the webservers running on some of them and I can't get there either. However I can ping and traceroute to the problem servers. I can also telnet to port 80 and get html back (mostly just error strings because I don't know what properly formed html requests look like.)

I've talked with our network guy at work and he can't figure out the problem. The machines I can access and the machines I can't are virtually indistinguishable. He's tried changing which switch they're plugged into and that hasn't modified anything. We were able to get my Mac connected to one of the problem machines by creating static routes on the problem server from my vpn assigned ip address to the vpn server, but that still doesn't explain why some servers need that route assigned and some don't.

I even brought my iBook into work to do more testing. While simply connected to our internal network I can access all of the local machines. If I connect to the VPN from within our local network I find that I cannot access the machines I couldn't access from home.

I've tried DigiTunnel ( http://www.gracion.com/gracion/vpn/ ) and experienced the exact same results. I've searched around and haven't found any reports of similar problems.

Does anyone know why some PC servers (Windows 2000) would be accessible from my Macs through the VPN and some wouldn't?

Thanks.

[Cop Rock]

I finally figured out the problem that's had our network guy stumped all week long.

A Windows 2000 machine could access our VPN at work and use Remote Desktop Client to log into any of our servers.
A Mac could access our VPN at work and use Remote Desktop Client to log into some of our servers but not all of them.

Initially I thought it might be a subnet issue but later I discovered that I could access all of the machines on one subnet but only some of the machines on the other. My coworker spent a significant amount of time trying to figure out if there was any difference between the machines that would explain why I could only access some of the servers. As far as he could tell the machines were virtually identical.

Yesterday I started poking around in the Computer Management utility trying to see if I could find any differences between the machines. After some false starts I realized that all of the machines that didn't work were on the same subnet and had the same version of wsock32.dll. Other machines on the same subnet that did work had different versions of wsock32.dll.

Our network guy came in today and determined that Windows 2000 Service Pack 1 and Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 appeared to be working and Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 on one of our subnets was not working. He then applied Service Pack 3 to one of the problem servers and now I can connect to it through our VPN.

So, if you're attempting to use MacOS X with a PC VPN you may run into problems connecting to Windows 2000 Service Pack 2.