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Trying to Connect to VPN Router Behind Server

Posted: Thu Jan 11, 2018 3:16 am
by DrewVPN
Hello all and I apologize in advance for my ignorance on a lot of these questions but I've tried reading up on every walk-through I can on the topic and am at the point that I have to ask others for help. I've spent the last week trying to get a VPN setup on our's company's network but behind our server and cannot get it to work. Let me start with the layout of how what I'm trying to do. At our small business, we have our internet that is supplied via a DSL Modem/Router as the source and then we connect our server to that via Ethernet cable. From there, our server assigns the computers in the building their own IP addresses and allows them to connect to the server's Point of Sales system and network webpages. All of the computers are connected via Ethernet cable as well and have no wireless capabilities, except for the laptops that we bought to try to take home with us to connect to the network.

I recently purchased a Netgear X6S or R8000P to act as a VPN server to allow connections from outside of the network to use the server and it's systems. I connected the router's WAN port to one of the ports on our server's switches for the workstations Ethernet cables and then used the router's admin page to setup the VPN. The instructions were pretty straight forward and specifies how to use OpenVPN on the client computers by downloading the config file and connecting that way. The problem I'm running into of course is that the IP address that the router has is probably just a gateway and therefore not an IP address that an outside computer could connect to, which is where my problem lies. I'm sure that if I was to figure out the DSL Modem/Router's true IP address that it wouldn't tunnel me into the LAN connection of the server's workstations because anything before the server at our business isn't able to see the network or server systems either, which is why I installed the R8000P after the server.

I could not get that to work and so SoftEther sounded like a much more user friendly solution for using a computer on the network as a server instead of the router. I was able to get SoftEther connected from outside the network and it would allow the computer to use the server's webpages but only if I chose to use an IP address supplied through the Azure project or what not. This would be fine with me if the connection was somewhat fast but for some reason, even though I could access the server's webpages when connected through SoftEther, the Point of Sales system wouldn't work right at all. For instance, a batch file that would open up the point of sales system through command prompts would just sit there with the small black screen open for about 10 minutes before it did 1 line of code, and would take another 5 minutes to do the second line.

I'm assuming that the speed issue must have to do with connecting to the IP address supplied on a host server much further away and so I'd love to just configure this properly but again, I know I'm quite ignorant when it comes to setting up a VPN due to the fact that it's behind our company's server and the internet is controlled through it as well. Through UltraVNC or Team Viewer, we are able to successfully Remote in and control the computers that way but it's not ideal and I just figured if we're somehow able to connect to the computers through Remote Viewers then their must be a way to connect to the network from outside of the office through a VPN.

All of your input and help would be super appreciated in this matter because I'm basically at a point where I'm going to kill these laptops or someone else if I keep just researching this without finding a solution. There must be a way that I could use an IP address supplied to the computer by the company's server to connect the VPN through SoftEther rather than using an IP Hostname supplied by Azure but I'm out of ideas on how to do that.

Re: Trying to Connect to VPN Router Behind Server

Posted: Thu Jan 11, 2018 11:54 pm
by DrewVPN
So I've reset the SoftEther Server on the computer that's on our work network and installed the client again on a laptop outside of the network. I then connected to the VPN successfully on the client computer and so far am having the exact same problems. Basically, I'm able to see the network server fine and access the network's webpage fine and without hardly any latency problems. However, as soon as I start to run the batch file that opens up our point of sales system through command prompts, it basically comes to a stand still and even causes the laptop to partially freeze at times.

I'm not sure what else to do since basically I've connected successfully to the VPN and can view network webpages. Another odd thing is that the SoftEther Virtual Hub says it's listening on 4 different ports such as 443 and 5555 but whenever I try to tell the client's connection settings to use a different port other than 443 the connection always fails, just like when I choose to try to use an IP address for the computer instead of one supplied by VPNAzure.

Re: Trying to Connect to VPN Router Behind Server

Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2018 6:14 am
by thisjun
I think that the author of the batch file assumes that the network delay is low. However the delay of the VPN is high.
Could you show the batch file?