Why won't my VPN connect?

Question

If I try to log on to my company's VPN, Vista simply says that it failed. If I deliberately use the wrong password, then it prompts me for a new one, meaning that it is at least reaching the VPN server and authenticating me.

In the event log, I have the following error logged against RasClient:

The user User-PC\User dialed a connection named xxxx which has failed.
The error code returned on failure is 812.

What is error 812, and more importantly, how do I make it go away?

Solution 1

You can see here a full listing of MS VPN errors:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923944

And, to fix this issue, you have to allow "Dial In Access" in Active Directory. It's an error related to permissions. I've been thru that a while ago.

Here is a good "Tuto" about that:

Allowing user dial in permissions:

1.) Open AD

2.) Choose User

3.) Select Properties for that user

4.) Click the 'Dial-In' Tab

5.) Check 'Allow Access" for Remote Access Permission (RAS) aka VPN

**Note: In the future you should really allow them based on a Remote Access Policy but that is outside the scope of your question.

Solution 2

Hopefully this post will solve your problems:

In many cases, VPN error 812 is permission issue or MS-CHAPv2 issue.

"I had this issue with one of our clients, and to resolve this issue, I changed the permission withing AD to allow dial in access, this resolved the issue right away"

Source: http://www.vistaheads.com/forums/microsoft-public-windows-vista-networking-sharing/178398-vpn-error-812-a.html

Comments

[qroberts]

Believe it or not I dug around Google and couldn't find a proper solution until I came across yours. No idea why the user didn't have access before as all accounts are usually copied from a template on our AD but this did the trick. Thanks!