Friday, November 19, 2010

Get out of gaol with a failed windows client VPN setup

I (perhaps foolishly) built a new laptop a few hours before travelling to the US for some client work.  It arrived 5:30 pm (on a pre 10am delivery!!), and I was up until 1:30 doing all the setup.  the next morning I was up bright and early (well early) to travel.
On arrival today, I found that I could not VPN from the machine with my (non-Domain Admin) account.  I won't bore you with all the testing I tried, but I did find a get out.
1) Login as domain admin (or similar)
2) connect VPN
3) Switch users
4) login as user
5) although the user cannot see the VPN, it is there "under the covers" and connections back to base worked fine
A victory for lateral thinking!

2 comments:

Feek said...

Some VPN clients have a preference setting to let the connection persist through logoff or user switch. Worth checking that if what you suggest doesn't work straight away.
K.

P Bryant said...

Thanks Feek, this was just OOBE windows 7 VPN setup, nothing fancy. TMG backend. Client not unimpressed that I hacked around the problem from the other side of the pond :-)