Windows 2000 Quick Fixes

Create a secure remote connection to your LAN

Here’s a common scenario: you’re going out of town but still need to be able to connect to your computer at the office or to the office LAN to continue working while you’re away. Or, perhaps you want to do a little work from home on your off hours or even telecommute for an extended period. Whatever the case, you no doubt want a secure connection. You could achieve a secure connection by dialing straight into your computer or to a remote access server on the LAN, but when the office is a toll call or the computer or LAN doesn’t offer direct dial-up connections, your local Internet connection is a good alternative.

You can create a secure connection to your office LAN or computer through a virtual private network, or VPN. The VPN connection encapsulates your network traffic in normal Internet IP traffic. In addition, the VPN can provide encryption to ensure that others can’t intercept and use the data moving to and from your computer. Windows 2000 offers two protocols for VPN: PPTP and L2TP. The former is the easiest to set up, but the latter provides better security.

Set up the VPN server

You can configure either Windows 2000 Professional or Windows 2000 Server to act as a VPN remote access server. This section provides the steps to configure Windows 2000 Server to function as a VPN server. It assumes you have some background in Server, routing, etc., and primarily need to know where to go in Server to configure incoming VPN connections. ...