[cartmill72]

I've got a good one that no one can seem to figure out, so I'm turning to the "Mac World" for help. Bear with me on the explanation of the problem - I am a long time Mac user but have little idea what I'm doing with networking (and apparently the same can be said for our network administrators). I'm the only person in my agency using a Mac (Power Mac G4 400 running OS X 10.2) - we have a Windows 2000-based server. To compound matters, I'm in a different building from our server, so I have to use PPTP to connect to our shared drives and directories. Using the built-in PPTP stuff in OS X's network tab works like a charm. I have everything configured properly. I then use Internet Connect to connect to our VPN. From there, I use the GO command and find my shared directories. But here comes the problem. If I'm using PPTP to access our VPN, I can't use the internet (email or browsers). It only works when I switch back to DHCP in the network tab. So, it would appear that I can only do one or the other - use the internet or access my shared directories. I normally wouldn't complain, but many times switching back and forth causes either speed/performance issues or worse, causes a system panic and I have to restart.

Does anyone know how I can use PPTP and connect to the internet, too? It seems like this should be a fairly straightforward thing. But so far I can't figure it out and our network people have washed their hands of it blaming the Mac's inferior network capabilities. Please tell me this isn't the case!!! I may have to go back to a Windows box at work if we can't figure this out.

Please help!

[Joe_Blow]

I've run into this issue in a Windows-to-Windows VPN situation...

My Internet connetion at home is through a gateway router, no proxy server. I would connect to my office through the Microsoft VPN client. My company network uses a Proxy server for accessing the Internet. I could not see the Internet while connected because my browser was configured for a direct connection (no proxy settings). IE on Windows allows you to create different browser configuration sets for different connections. I configured IE to use the company proxy settings for the VPN "connection". This configured the browser to use the proxy server when connected through the VPN and a direct connection when not. Works like a charm.

Your problem sounds similar. Does your company use a Proxy server, or different Proxy servers at the different locations? I have not yet configured my Mac at home to connect through a VPN to my office, so I'm not sure how you would check these settings on the Mac, but I will look into it later.

[Nobody]

check out
blank>http://www.gracion.com/vpn/

and
blank>http://pptp.monitzer.com/

they might do the job (the pptp giu did the job for me, but as a matter of fact it only works in os 10.1.x - so you will have to wait until it's been updated)

sorry to tell you i have just found out the 'digitunnel' doesn''t work with jaguar either -
images/icons/frown.gif you'll have to wait a couple of weeks...

[ 09-05-2002: Message edited by: sonic buster ]