BT Business Hub + PPTP VPN Server Woes

[mdugdale]

Hi all,

For months i have been trying to set up a VPN on my small business server. It works perfectly on my netgear dg834g router and remote clients are able to connect and do what they need to do. However, i need to use the BT Business Hub so that i can use my broadband voice lines. I had a 2700HGV to start with, and had no luck at all with it, got the infamous GRE protocol 47 error message on the remote clients. Rang BT a few months back and they said they could put me through to someone but wanted x amout of pounds to do it (not paying that!!)

Anyway i left it for a while, but now the company has remote workers and it needs to be working. i now have a 2701HGV-C which BT sold me as being VPN Server capable - not! Exact same message.

Is any one able to shed some light on this??

My set up is: Phone Line <---> 2701HGV <---> SBS Server <---> LAN

I have a 5 pack of static IPs and the SBS Server is configured with a public IP.

Thanks for any help provided!

[Norrie]

mdugdale,

Two points worth noting.

1) I have never successfully got VPN working unless you reduce the subscription from multiple IP addresses to only one IP address. I never received a satisfactory answer form BT why this should be. All I can say is that when we got rid of our multiple IPs and reduced it to one, the problem went away.

2)You have to configure the firewall to pass VPN packets. To do this, select "PPTP Server" from the predefined list in the Firewall settings and be sure to choose the IP address of your server which looks outwards towards the WAN (if you have more than one NIC installed).

Hope that helps.

Cheers

Norrie

[kane_123bt]

Hi,

I set up this on Monday for a client and though early days seems to be working OK.

I'm using PPTP vpn on windows 2008 server. They only have one static IP which is assigned to the BT hub, and I set that to forward PPTP packets to the internal server ip address.

On your network I see that the server has a public IP so the choice of BT hub shouldn't be an issue as the public IP should be able to see all traffic  (before it blocks anything) so I'm confused as to what is blocking GRE protocol.

[nkpa]

if your server has a public ip and the router/hub is setup correctly with the static ip, then i would at a guess say that the problem is more likely with the server and not the connection, when you assign a publc ip to a machine, it will bypass all of the nat stuff on the router, ie port forward and firewall. you are effectively putting that machine direct on the internet.

my first port of call would be to check the windows firewall settings(assuming thats what your using)

[nkpa]

that will teach me not to read the post date ....

anyway useful for anybody else in the same situation

[Josh4321]

PPTP is inseure and should not be considered a "VPN".

if you use PPTP you should assume that anyone can read what you are doing. 

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,54255.0.html

feel free to contact me if you need a proper VPN solution.