VPN working, now I got another problem

[dloranger]

Hey guys, I got a router to router VPN in place and I'm able to communicate from my remote site to my main site. Although I can't browse the network using network neighborhood and such, one of my software can't be installed cause it's using this very same neighborhood to select his server. I reseached my problem on the net, it seems to be related to NetBIOS resolution. I was planning on installing a WINS, does it has to be on my remote site or on my main site?

 

[Zakkas]

We had this problem with one of our customers at work and its related to the master server browser that network neighborhood needs so it can list all the devices on your network by name. Odds are if you open a command prompt you can ping the server your trying to access by name and by ip address which means DNS is working as is IP communication.

The problem is because the browser gets its listing of devices in a domain/workgroup via broadcast on port 137 (I think that is the right port). VPN's do not forward broadcasts unfortunately. Our way around this was to create VPN tunnels between the sites and then create GRE tunnels inside of those VPN tunnels so that broadcasts would traverse the GRE tunnel.

If your running Cisco routers I could point you in the right direction for setting something like this up. I'm not sure if a lot of other routers will support this operation.

The real issue though is the broadcasts of the server browser not being sent out of the network to your remote site. I'm not sure if creating a relay agent would solve the issue but you could try implementing that as well.

 

[dloranger]

Thanks for answering my post, I did succesfully browse the network, it was a Netbios resolution issue indeed. both of my routers support netbios through vpn, so i configured my wins server option on my client with the router ip and it worked! as if my router would be the wins server

 

[dloranger]

It worked only while my laptop was connected to my remote network so I must be having a master browser issue, any ideas how to resolve it?

 

[Zakkas]

The master browser operates on a broadcast basis. A router won't forward broadcasts even thru a VPN tunnel. Your best bet is to find if Netgear supports GRE configurations and see if you can setup the GRE tunnel inside the VPN tunnel. Then broadcasts will go right thru and you should see a listing of servers when looking in your network places.

As far as I know thats the only way to get the master browser info on the remote site.