Win 7 + Netgear VPN issue

Hardware and technical stuff
1

I have the magical Netgear 3700 and I’m trying to get VPN configured so I can access my network externally. I got the port forward setup for PPTP, and I can connect, get a login, etc. and it all works. I get an IP address, etc.

But I can’t see any machines on the network, and I’m unsure why. I don’t think this is a VPN or router issue since it should just be forwarding all traffic to the destination machine, and since I logged in successfully that shouldn’t be the issue.

The RAS server is setup to provide IP addresses via DHCP; allow incoming VPN to connect to LAN; and my user is setup as well.

Internal machines aren’t responding to pings, RDP requests, etc. It’s like the incoming machine is just on the network but totally blind/boxed out.

Destination computer also has firewall disabled.

2

So I solved this and figured I’d post it just out of completeness.

AFter struggling with a zillion different options, the two likely culprits were either using DHCP to assign addresses (inside Win 7’s RAS setup) or that I had two NICs which were causing Win 7 to screw up routing. I manually assigned IPs and then disabled my 2nd NIC, and it all now works.

Whew.

Note: apparently installing VMWare will magically re-enable Windows Firewall. That was kind of a crappy topper to trying to debug things.