Setting Up Your Office For Remote Access: Setting Up and Connecting the Router Part 2

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Setting up the Router

The router I have chosen to use is the Cisco RVS4000 VPN Router (currently $135 from office depot). Any VPN router will work; you will just need to follow the setup instructions that came with your device.

• Unplug one of your current workstations from the network and plug it directly into the VPN router. It will be assigned an IP address in the 192.168.1.x subnet.
• Open Internet Explorer and navigate to http://192.168.1.1
• It will prompt you for the username and password (by default both are set to admin – you should later change this from the Administration tab.)
• For the Internet Connection Type: set to Static IP
• Enter the Internet IP address, Subnet Mask, Default Gateway and Primary and Secondary DNS from the Static IP information provided by your ISP and then click the Save button
• Click on the LAN setup tab – by default the Local IP Address is set to 192.168.1.1 – remember as I explained earlier this means the Network Subnet is 192.168.1 and the Host is 1. Here is the problem – most routers are setup this way. What this means is when a remote user connects to the VPN, the chance that their home router is also setup with the 192.168.1.x subnet is very high. A VPN connection needs a different subnet on each side to understand how to route information between them.
• Change the Local IP Address so it belongs to a subnet that will most likely NOT be in use at the remote side – e.g. 192.168.123.1
• Click on Save at the bottom of the page
• Now that we have changed the IP address of the router, the computer we are currently using will be unable to communicate to it because we are still on the 192.168.1.x subnet. To fix this, unplug the network cable going from the computer to the router for about 10 seconds and then plug it in again. This will force the computer to request a new IP address which should belong to the 192.168.123.x subnet.
• Navigate to http://192.168.123.1 using Internet Explorer and log back in with the username and password
• Click on the VPN tab – and then on VPN Client Accounts
• Enter a Username and Password for each remote user and then click the Add/Save button to generate your user accounts. This will be the username and password the user will enter into the VPN client program to connect

Connect the Router

• At this point the router should be setup, we should be able to unplug the old router, and plug in the new router in its place. Test to make sure internet connectivity is working with the new router. (With some access devices – Cable/DSL modems, they may need to be power cycled to recognize the new router). If the internet is working through the new VPN router proceed to the next step, if it is not we need to figure out what went wrong and resolve it before moving forward.

Part 3