Initiate a VPN at boot time?

[Joern Bredereck]

Hi,

 

I have a Windows 2008 R2 box which is located off site in a datacenter. In order to connect it to our LAN I set up an outgoing VPN connection from the Windows 2008 box to our central VPN gateway.

 

When I initiate the connection manually after I logged in via RDP the connection works just fine. But as soon as I log off the connection is being terminated.

 

Two Questions:

 

a) How do I prevent the connection from being dropped as soon as I log off?

b) Is it possible to run the VPN as a service in the background so it get's started automaticly at boot time?

 

It's important that this VPN tunnel is running 24/7 without any user interaction.

 

As far as I know it's possibly with third-party tools like "OpenVPN", but we will have to use Microsoft's PPTP for that connection.

 

Connecting the other way around (from the LAN to the off site server) is not an option. The connection has to be initiated from the windows box to the central VPN gateway. Using a dedicated PPTP router at the off site location is also not possible.

 

Any help is appreciated!

 

Regards,

Joern

[iphonogasm]

Hi,

 

i beleive you need to run a script on startup, but i havnt done this myself.

 

I have created a shortcut and put in the "startup" directory and make sure its selected in msconfig.msc >> startup.

 

Then in the settings for the VPN, click options, under dialing options, remove all ticks. also make sure you have the credientials save. This will initiate the connection in the background.

 

this will connect your VPN on startup, however

 

it connects quite late, (once the required services load etc,) and also, this doesnt work if the client enters "sleep" mode then wakes. Other then this, running a custom script is the only other way i know of.

 

Hope this helps!