Browse mapped network drives when connected over VPN

Question

I have users who constantly travel outside the office.

Internally, they have mapped network drives.

They then go outside and connect via VPN which when connected bridges and puts them on the same subnet. They can ping resources on the network over the VPN without any issue.

When they try and connect to the same network drive by name it takes a long time to connect and then says the share name cannot be found.

The particulars are as follows:

1. Internally, everything works fine
2. I am running WINS on the server to which they are trying to connect.
3. This WINS server is provided in the DHCP options for VPN clients
4. DNS is provided in the DHCP option for VPN clients For adapter bindings
5. On Windows 7 clients network adapter properties I have ensured Remote Connections are the top priority over local connections
6. If connection by IP address is used, it works, but fails when connecting by machine name

What other steps should I try to resolve the above?

Solution

Are you being careful to use the same naming when troubleshooting as when connecting to the network share? For example, are you pinging:

ping servername.domain

But connecting to a server share:

\\servername\share

If you're able to ping with a fqdn, try setting up the user's network shares the same way. I've seen issues before where not specifying the domain name when on VPN tries to access the user's local network instead.

I'm also curious if you're getting an external IP when pinging the network resources. I've seen VPN connections to a network that's Windows domain is also the company's website, and pinging servername.domain.com ends up getting a result from a catch-all web server instead of the internal resource.

Comments

[Brent Pabst]

First, why are you still using WINS? Do you have old servers or clients on the network? Second, if you run nslookup commands over the VPN connection to your servers what results, if any, do you get?

[HopelessN00b]

It's a WINS or DNS issue. If you can, get rid of WINS and see if that fixes it, if not, troubleshoot both. Most common causes of this type of issue I see are 1) split-DNS setups using external DNS servers to look up internal servers and 2) the wrong or no DNS suffix being appended to non-qualified hostnames. So, I'd look at those two things first.

[HopelessN00b]

No, no, no, no, NO! First of all, don't use the hosts file, and second of all, you'll be searching until the end of the world if you're looking for hosts.ini (Not to mention that editing hosts.ini won't help in the slightest anyway).