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Gordon710Flag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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VPN to client on work network

Hi

I have a working VPN to my work network that allows me to connect just fine to my server (SBS2011 Essentials). Mapped drives on my laptop are successfully mapped once the VPN is connected.

However I need access to a mapped drive on a client PC because the shared folders uses Quickbooks sharing, software that will only work on SBS 2008 or earlier or in our case Windows 7 Pro. It works perfectly in house.

My router currently forwards VPN-PPTP to the server ip address.

Ideally i would like to connect to both server and the client at the same time if possible

If not I could create another mapping to a different port and the relevant IP address, would this work?

GHB
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Rob Williams
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Are you wanting to run QuickBooks locally and connect to the data at the corporate site via VPN?  If so, this is not supported due to the slow Internet connection. QuickBooks requires the data be on the same LAN.  Accessing any database of this type over a VPN is very slow and due to the fact that they are so 'chatty' it will often result in data los or corruption. Even a wireless LAN connection is not officially supported by QuickBooks.

The best bet for remote access to QuickBooks is a terminal server or PC to which you can logon using Remote Web Access, through SBS Essentials.  This keeps the data at the corporate site for security and only sends screen refreshes to the remote client, not data.

From the QuickBooks site:
Minimum network requirements:
  100 Mbps network card
  100 Mbps switch or router
  40 Mbps network bandwidth
http://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/support/articles/INF21187#four

This is not achievable via the internet/VPN
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ASKER

That's exactly what I wanted to do.

What you say makes sense, though both ends of the Inter-network are just short of 40Mbps (Superfast or FTTC) and I wanted to try to see if it would work.

Since my posting I've been trying to access anything on the particular PC via vpn but cannot. Other PC's I can so I guess it's down to permissions.

Thanks for you help anyway.
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Rob Williams
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I appreciate your help with this but even when I succeed in establishing the connection you don't sound too hopeful of it being viable (at least reliably so).

I've been messing about trying to establish a connection all afternoon and it's not essential so rather than waste any more of your time I've decided to accept your recommendations not to pursue it further.

Thanks for your help.

Gordon
Thanks Gordon.

SBS Essentials is a great product in that it has built-in and pre-configured "Remote Web Access" which will allow you to connect to any server or PC in the office to which you have been granted permissions.  This allows you to work as if in front of the console, keeps data secure, and performs extremely well even on a slow connection.  Many folk as a solution for your problem set up a dedicated physical or virtual PC/s for remote users.  A terminal server is the ideal solution if you have more than a few remote users.

Details regarding final configuration of RWA:
http://titlerequired.com/2011/07/15/setting-up-remote-web-access-on-sbs-2011-essentials-part-1/