Upstream discovery?

[jimgurley]

I connect to the office from home with the 5.x VPN Client to an ASA appliance.  Win7x64, firewll off.  My home network is set to allow discovery.

If I try to browse my home computer from the office, I can't get to the machine.  I can ping it by name or IP, and there are entries for both the home IP and the VPN tunnel IP in DNS.  A search fails as well. What I actually want to do is transer a file from the office to home using an office application, so browsing is just the simplist example of failure, I think.  I can't run the application from home since it involves a lot of file actions on the work server, and would take forever.

Should this work? If it should, any ideas how to troubleshoot (or fix) the issue?

[Marvin Rhoads]

You can try simply temporarily mounting your home PC hard drive as a network drive from the office server specifying your home machine's VPN IP address.

     net use \\\c$

or something like:

     net use z: \\192.168.100.10\c$:

You should be prompted to supply a local admin account (on your home PC) to mount the drive. Once mounted, you can save to PC hard drive as if it were local.

[jimgurley]

Will the mounted volume survive VPN disconnections, etc.?  I guess I'll give it a try and see...

[jimgurley]

Well, none of that worked.  I tried "net use" and id reported Error 67, network path not found.  I tried by IP and by name.

Then I realized I could ping by name, but NOT by IP, even though the ping by name resolved to the expected IP.  So I added an entry into hosts. and now neither ping will work.  I removed the entry in hosts, and no pings work, but I'd guess I need to flush the dns cache or something else like than (that I have no clue how to do).,

[jimgurley]

More data:

I did an "ipconfig/flushdns" and nowt I get the ping by name again, but it's resolving to the VPN tunnel IP address, not the adapter address.  The "net use" command with the tunnel IP fails the same way (error 67). I may have to take away my admin privileges!  (except I'm the only one).

[Marvin Rhoads]

When you conect via remote access VPN you typically are assigned an IP address from a VPN address pool. That address is dynamically assigned and generally only applicable to the current session. That is the address you should be able to reach and map a share drive to (c$).

[jimgurley]

The net use command to the VPN IP still generates an error 67 - The Network Name Can't Be Found.

I can ping by name (which resolves to the VPN address) or ping by VPN address directly.  Pinging by the actual network IP fails.

net use z: \\192.168.63.3\h$ where h is a shared drive on the remote system.  I also tried it with a colon on the end, although that was probably a typo in your original message.

I can complicate my application by having scripts running on both computers and having them handshake via a "downstream" semaphore if this can't be fixed.  It sure seems like it must be something trivial...