Can't find windows share despite having connected VPN

Question

I'm a programmer dammit, I should be allowed to ask these kinds of IT questions! :)

Anyway the problem is as follows. I'm writing an automatic build script to deploy code to a live windows 2003 server. To get access to the server I enabled the VPN role, and I can connect to it remotely from my dev machine using a username and password I set up on the server from the network connections screen.

I set up a share on that machine and gave full share+security permissions to the account I am using to connect. Once connected, I would have thought I would be able to see the share. In fact I can't even see the computer even though the VPN is connected (if i type '\IPADDRESS\' into the run box nothing comes up).

Am I missing an essential step here?

Answer 1

So you can use Remote Desktop Connection to connect to the server, but CIFS/SMB (shares) is not working?

Is there a Windows firewall setting that needs to be changed (... I don't even know if there was a 2003 update that included Windows firewall)?

Pinging the IP address results in which error message (or, hopefully none if you can RDC)?

Is the remote server and your local dev box on the same IP subnet? If its not routed properly you may be trying to hit a local address.

Answer 2

I actually know very little about the server. I was given an IP address and username/password for RDC and asked to create a script to deploy some code to it. The plan is for the script to VPN onto the box using RASDIAL (successful) and then to NET USE a share to robocopy the file across.

The share has been set up and can be accessed from the server at \localhost\Release\ so thats all set up correctly. I thought that once you connect a VPN it's like being behind the firewall, but maybe not!

Answer 3

It looks to me like you can't connect to a network share from inside the same session that you esatblished the VPN connection in. I now manually open the VPN connection, then kick off the build scripts