Hello Jackl,
Referring to the SME 6.0.1-01 built-in VPN system .....
I'm sure that there is a time-out problem somewhere. I tried to make another VPN connection to my troublesome network last Saturday late P.M. and it failed miserably with the Error 619. Having had enough I went home for the weekend. I got back into the office at 0830 this morning and thought I would just try connecting one last time - it worked, just like that!!
Anyway, on a more general note there seems to be another strange thing happening .....
1. Establish the connection. From past experience this will (generally) work OK BUT in order to be able to do anything in the newly connected server we need to find it.
2. On the newly connected Windoze workstation, search for computers. In the search box specify the name of the server. Hit search and the server is quickly found.
3. Double click on the newly found server icon and we get a login box (First question - Why is this? I just logged onto the server via the VPN?). Log on as admin/<password> - just to see if everything's working.
4. Everything OK now - but notice that the user 'fred' who established the VPN is seeing the 'admin' set of files because of the requirement to complete the login box in 3. above.
5. This is not what we want. So, kill the connection and junk the VPN definition out of the 'Network and Dial-up connections' area.
6. Restart the Windoze box for good measure. Log on as Administrator and create a connection for anyone to use. Establish the connection as before - but this time the files on the server are immediately available - no additional 'connect as...' step required.
7. Unfortunately this poses a problem because 'fred', who just logged onto the server from the Administrator account on the Windoze box, cannot see his home directory on the server - just the 'admin' home. This is not what's required.
8. Shut everything down and log onto the Windoze box as another user. Re-establish the connection. Search for the computer - NO COMPUTER!!!!
So, things aren't really doing what they appear to be doing.
Time to check out the log files on the server. Here I find an intersting couple of lines in the /var/log/meassages file. Namely ....
Jan 31 09:46:06 cssl-server e-smith[4314]: WARNING in /etc/e-smith/templates//etc/rc.d/init.d/masq/00Definitions: Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /etc/e-smith/templates//etc/rc.d/init.d/masq/00Definitions line 5.
Jan 31 09:46:06 cssl-server e-smith[4314]: WARNING: Template processing succeeded for //etc/rc.d/init.d/masq: 1 fragment generated warnings
Jan 31 09:46:06 cssl-server e-smith[4314]: at /etc/e-smith/events/ip-down/S80conf-masq line 46
I've had a quick look at the offending file and at the resultant /etc/rc.d/init.d/masq file and there seems to be something awry here. The variable 'OUTERIF' is undefined! As I'm not very good at debugging this stuff when I don't have the luxury of time, perhaps there's an expert out there who can lend his/her wisdom?
So, that seems to be the situation. In a nutshell the VPN appears to work well and be very stable, but only under certain conditions. It seems that the NetBIOS side of things is not functioning despite opening ports 137, 138, 138, 445, 1273 with appropriate protocols. It seems too that once the server files have been made accessible then the particular set of files with which the connection was made remain visible regardless of who logs onto the system.
Comments, anyone???
regards,
Dave
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