VPN over GPRS - Working

[Guest zuffzuff]

After a lot of mucking about and net trawling, I've got a VPN connection working on my C500. For anyone interested, here is what you have to do:

1/ Ring Orange - 156 - and tell them you want Internet VPN access. The guy I spoke to had to go off and ask, but eventually found out about it. They will send you a SIM update.

2/ You have to change your GPRS access point from orangeinternet to internetvpn. Orange should tell you this when you ring up.

3/ Go into connections on the C500 and add a VPN connection. You have to set up the IP of your VPN, username, password and domain. In my case I'm using PPTP - I've not tried IpSec.

4/ In connections, set up what are called "Work Exceptions". This was what was giving me problems. Suppose you have two machine behind your VPN called Myserver1 and Myserver2. If you enter a fully qualified URL into explorer, it will go off over the internet and bypass the VPN. If you just enter the machine name - say Myserver1 - then the C500 will use the VPN and start a PPTP session.

So, in the Work Exceptions, for the above example, you would put "http://myserver*" - any URL starting Myserver means go over the VPN.

Likewise, if your VPN uses full URL's you would have to add an exception.

5/ Reboot the phone.

6/ Start explorer and enter the URL of e.g. Myserver1.

7/ You should get a login prompt. This is the login for your VPN (assuming you havent entered the password when you set up the VPN on the C500 in step 3/

If you are lucky, you should get your web page.

[Guest steve_smith]

Thanks for posting this... useful information for those of us wanting to make a VPN connection.

Steve.

[Guest Randallc]

Is this the same for setting up the mail client to connect the VPN then access a mail server?

[Guest zuffzuff]

It should work the same for email, but I can't confirm. Our email server is behind a different VPN that requires RSA two part authentication to connect. At the moment, I can't find any way of getting past that.

[Guest JPo_23]

Will I be able to do this on my E200, or will it only work on the C500?

[Guest Djarid]

Just a quick question about the wildcard...

Can it be placed in front of the host name and so provide host wildcarding as opposed to domain wildcarding? (a lot more usefull this way)

eg. *.mydomain.com

[Guest BC]

Since creating a new GPRS connection for WORK and entering Work url exceptions I've found that when browsing Internet/WAP/Intranet the GPRS connection is dropped after each page loads. It's making browsing very slow as a new connection has to be established each time I click a link? Is this so that the phone can check the exception list each time and ensure correct connection is used?

[Guest campbs]

Thanks for the help on this, got Active Sync to work a treat!

Edited October 7, 2005 by campbs