I am struggling to find any information on configuring a Vista Home Premium pc as a VPN server to work with a Draytek 2820 router. I would greatly appreciate any advice available (as detailed as possible please).

Hi,

Are you trying to setup the Draytek to deal with the VPN serving for you (bad idea in my experience) or are you trying to setup the Vista machine to be the VPN server and the Draytek is just acting as a VPN passthrough?

If you are trying to use anything built into the Windows operating system then it will only allow single user connections unless you upgrade to a Server version.

I would recommend OpenVPN if you are looking for a VPN server/client package.

http://www.openvpn.org

Hope that helps,

Andy.

Andy, many thanks for your reply. I understood that the 2820 allows 32 concurrent sessions.
Surely OpenVPN is not designed for Windows Op Sys servers?

Hi,

OpenVPN runs on either Linux or Windows. I use it to connect about 40 Windows clients into a single Linux server behind a Draytek router through one port. Works fine as the Linux box has all the ip forwarding stuff you need out of the box. You can run the OpenVPN server on either Linux or Windows.

Best regards,

Andy.

Sorry Andy, I still cannot see how I can use Open Vpn as a server technology on a Vista system. I copied the following from the OpenVpn.Org FAQ page: Which operating systems can be used to host the Access Server software?

Currently, the Access Server software must be run on a Linux host. The software is released in the form of binary package files for particular Linux distributions. At this time, RPM packages are released for hosts running 32-bit amd 64-bit installations of CentOS 4, 5 or Fedora 8, 9, 10, and Debian packages are released for hosts running 32-bit and 64-bit installations of Ubuntu 8, 9.
Support for RedHat Enterprise Linux is coming soon. Additional Unix platforms may be supported in the future.

Last Updated ( Wednesday, 24 June 2009 00:10 )

I know that the client software will work on a Windows system but I am stuck with Vista for the server.

So that's progress for you. They've gone all up market like VNC, etc. I've just looked at the website - it's not the one I got all the source code from last year. You could (or so I was led to believe) compile the source and run it under cygwin (unix for windows)

You could always use VMWare and install a Linux OS on that.

Sorry for leading you up a dead end.

Best regards,

Andy.