Windows 2003 RRAS keeps giving me a APIPA 169.x.x.x address

Question

I've got a box running Windows 2003 Server at home. I have configured RRAS so I can VPN to my home network from an outside location. The home-LAN uses the 192.168.2.x IP-address range.

Once I connected say, from my workplace, I could see (using IPCONFIG) that the PPTP adapter got an IP address on the home-LAN, 192.168.2.35 for example, and I could ping and connect to the Windows 2003 server box and ALL the other machines on my home LAN, just like I wanted.

Then, one day when I connected to my home LAN I discovered that I could only connect to the server machine itself. The other machines at home were unreachable. Then I realized that I was no longer getting the correct IP address once I connected. Now the PPTP adapter always gets a 169.x.x.x address. I believe this has got something to do with DHCP, but I did not make any configuration changes that I'm aware of.

I read somewhere that one way of solving this is having the RRAS server assign from a static pool of IP-addresses. Is that the only way, if so, how do I do that?

Basically, I just want to be able to connect to my home-LAN using VPN and be able to communicate with all the machines at home, just as if I was at home.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Well ... nevermind!

I found out how to specify a pool of IP addresses for the server to assign to clients rather than use DHCP. I configured that, still not working ... then I realized that the network on the server was more screwed up than I had known. Basically no external connections were working ... I disabled/enabled the Local Area Network connection on the server and now everything works.

Thanks anyways :-)