Trouble with wireless and SonicWall VPN software

[hammerpe33]

I work remotely and recently got a Laptop. I had a desktop running win2k, connected via RJ45 to a WRT54G Router. For 3 years now I have had no problems connecting to my clients netowork through SonicWall Global VPN client. I had access to all of the network drives, outlook through their exchange server etc... I now have an Alienware laptop running winxp SP2. It has a Realtek RTL8169/8110 Family gigabit Ethernet NIC on board.
I currently have it hooked up to the WRT54G via RJ45. It is hard to connect to the network. Sometimes I have to disable/enable the NIC then it works. What I mean by hard to connect is the following:

Sonicwal VPN software says I'm connected. When I click on one of my mapped network drives, it says device already in use. I can open Outlook and connect to the exchange server, my softphone works. Like I said the only thing that doesn't work is the networks drives. Sometimes if I wait a half an hour or so I'll click on one of the drives and walla I can now navigate through the drive. Sometimes it doesn't work at all and I have to enable/disable the NIC, or enable NEtBIOS over TCP/IP then disable it.

If I try coneecting wirelessly I simply cannot see the exchange server or any of the mapped drives.

I have the following TCP/IP settings:

IP 172.16.0.21
Subnet Mask 255.255.0.0
Def Gateway 172.16.0.1

DNS server 1 207.135.127.66
DNS server 2 207.135.64.66

Can anyone help diagnose the problem? I would ultimatly like to get the wireless connection working.

Oh yea my Linksys is running DD-WRT v23 SP1 for Firmware and I am using a Motorola SB5101 Surfboard Cable Modem

Just wanted to add one more thing. Sometimes I cannot access the internet, even though I am connected on the VPN. If
I ping anything it just times out.

Thanks!

[dj_alien]

I suspect your VPN settings. Play with the settings even though your connected doesn't mean that it works great. I had the same issue VPN wouldn't work using wireless or rj45 though it showed as connected, yet using a dialup it worked. I disabled I think transparent tunneling and it works fine now.

[Archangel122184]

Try creating a script to delete and remap the drives everytime you reconnect to the VPN. This is a common problem for sattelite users on the network I operate.

The script can bet a batch/com file.

net use drive: /delete
net use drive: \\server\share

just repeat that for all your shared drives and run the script when you connect to the vpn.

[hammerpe33]

dj_alien: I'll try to play with the settings. There isn't a whole lot I can play with. Under the Peers tab withing the group VPN properties there is NAT Traversal which is set to automatic, Interface Selection which is set to automatic, and LAN settings (which is the Next Hop IP address).

Archangel: I will try that. I suspect something else though. When I ipconfig /all and I'm connected through the VPN my default gateway doesn't show up. I have to go into netowrk connections and change the default gateway to something slightly different, then change it back. Then everything is hunky dory......

At least I can connect now through RJ45 and get my work done. I'll try your suggestions and let you know what happens.

[Archangel122184]

If your default gateway doesn't show up, the DHCP server for the VPN connection is not listing it properly because it is not configured properly or doesn't know to broadcast it.

If you like, I can give you a command for a batch file that can set your default gateway for you.

[hammerpe33]

Yes that would be nice. Do I run the batch file from my end? My VPN software has the ability to run a batch file when a connection is established....

[Archangel122184]

Yes. You run it all from your end.

To set your default gateway:

netsh interface ip set address "name of network connection" gateway=<gateway address>