Port to turn on

Hi:

Thanks for responding. As usual, something you think would be fairly straightforward is more involved. I will try and answer the above questions below.

"And, why does Earthlink need to know the ports (assuming that Earthlink is your ISP)?" The setup we have is that the office LAN is connected to a router that is connected to Earthlink. Earthlink remotely controls the router (we do not have the access codes) so I believe that the ports are opened on the router which is the reason earthlink needs to know which ones to turn on.

"Otherwise as the question above states you will need to provide your VPN details." All I want to do is to connect from my home computer which is running WinXP to my office computer that is running WinXP and vice versa if possible (I don't have a static IP address at home). I intend to use the software built into WinXP to create the VPN. I would also like to us the remote desktop feature that is also a part of WinXP.

"Well if you are going to form a VPN lan to lan tunnel using the standard cisco set-up you will require protocols 50 and 51 and port udp 500." I would guess that the answer to my question is port 500 and I should tell Earthlink to turn this port on but the "udp" prior to the 500 concerns me. I have no idea what protocols 50 and 51 mean.

So, given the above is port 500 the correct answer or is more information needed?

Thanks again,

David

hi ahoffmann:

I think that answers the question. I'll tell Earthlink to turn on port 500 (udp) and if they need or I see options for protocols I'll use 50 and 51.

thanks for your help.

David

Hi Infotrader:

I'm glad you said port 1723 because that was my first guess before contacting Experts Exchage. In the end, I asked Earthlink to turn on the following ports: 500, 1723 and 3389. I figured it wouldn't be a problem to turn on extra ports, they would be just left unused. Although, I'm sure I'll hear from someone that says that this could be a problem too :)

David