Monday, July 11th, 2011
Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 has some great new ways of connecting your road warriors and teleworkers to your network. For most of us Systems Administration types Routing and Remote Access is still the most common way of achieving this connectivity without DirectAccess. Because I have written this documentation up twice now for two separate companies I thought it would be worth writing it a third time and placing it in the public domain for reference in the future.
The documentation assumes that the VPN End Point is Windows Server Routing and Remote Access, however the instructions work for a number of other vendors VPN end points.
What you will need:
- Windows 7.
- A workplace with a compatible VPN End Point.
- Your account enabled to use the VPN.
- The IP address of your VPN End Point.
- Your Username, Password and Domain.
1. Click the “Networking” tray icon
It is a monitor with a network cable to the left of it, although quite understandably some users see it as a “monitor and a fork”:
2. Go to Network and Sharing Center
It is the link at the bottom of the popup you see after clicking the Networking tray icon.
3. Click “Connect to a network”
4. Click “Connect to a workplace”
5. Click “Use my Internet connection (VPN)”
6. Enter your settings then click Next
The “Internet address” is the four part IP address of your work place, your friendly help desk or company intranet should be able to provide this information. The destination name is purely a useful name for you to refer to your connection as I would suggest the name of your company.
7. Enter your Login details then click Next
Chances are these Login details are going to be the same details you login to the computer with. Whilst the domain is labelled as optional it may be required for your workplace, again your IT Helpdesk or Intranet should be able to provide this to you.
8. Wait
This bit can take a while, the VPN Client will connect to your workplace VPN send your login details then setup the connection.
9. Your Done!
You may find that anything that was connected such as MSN Messenger has disconnected, it should eventually connect again however it will be done through your workplaces internet connection so beware what you are doing. You shouldn’t do what you shouldn’t do, get over it.
10. Remember to disconnect (and how to reconnect)
Remember that “Monitor and Fork” icon in the bottom right hand corner of your screen, if you click that you will be able to see that your new VPN connection is connected. Once you are done you can disconnect by clicking the connection then clicking “Disconnect”. You can reconnect in the future in a similar way, click the “Monitor and Fork” select the connection then click “Connect”.
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Friday, December 31st, 2010
I try to do this post every year as it gives me an idea of where my readers come from and what they are looking at. My blog is consistently getting 100+ unique visitors per day, most of these are new visitors who have found a blog post via organic search results (Google, Yahoo!, etc), with a smaller number having found me through links from other sites or directly into the site.
The most popular article by far has been Change your MTU in Vista and Windows 7, this is in no small part because I have written one of the few articles that explains the method to identify your ideal MTU, not just the command to change it. The next most popular article is another one from last year titled Card Reader on Acer Aspire 5100 Series under Windows 7 and my explanation of obtaining an Elevated Command Prompt in Windows 7 comes in at number 5. With the top two entries centred around fixing problems with Windows 7 this suggests more people are interested in getting their computer working than programming, ho hum.
My review of OneNote and Evernote has been fairly popular, as has my review of Center Parcs from 2008. I shall try and review products and holidays as I go along, although I am reguarly stuck for inspiration in these terms.
Visitor Breakdown
- iPhone/iPad/iPod are the most popular mobile platforms to view my site with over three times as many visitors using iOS than Android.
- Most popular Browser is Firefox with 40% of the share, IE comes in at 33% and Chrome at 17.5%, strangely Opera has a 4.3% share – I was under the impression that Opera’s market share has been dropping off.
- Windows holds 95% of the operating system share, presumably the result of my Windows 7 posts.
Keywords
Unsurprisingly the most of the searches are for “windows 7 mtu” or similar. There also appear to be quite a few people searching for drivers by Googling device strings, this can work well, although in the first instance you should try PCI Database. Further down the list a couple of people have been searching for MSM/PSL which is the prescribed acronym for making a manovure as taught by the DSA, there are some good resources all over the internet including Smart Learners.
Someone has been searching for me on LinkedIn, it may not have been me you were looking for but here is my profile for reference purposes.
One user got to my site looking for an answer to the question “windows 7 what are the blue & yellow shields on desktop shortcut icons for”; unsure what it was for but these icons describe executables or shortcuts that either contain information in their manifest or have had their properties changes to require administration rights to execute. There are quite a few posts on social.microsoft.com but very little explaining exactly why they are there.
There don’t seem to be any funny keyword sequences any more (I looked through all 7,000 from 2010), maybe some will show up next year. So until 2011, good bye and have a happy new year!
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