VPN Help Please

Im pretty new to VPN (read- never messed with it before) anyway I set up a Win 2k server with dhcp and vpn, here is where the fun begins, so bear with me if I leave something important out. I from home with XP Pro can connect just fine to the server, and map the appropriate drive and so on, I can do what ever neccessary on the mentioned server, but what I need is to get to the mail server, what am I missing, I can browse the network and see the server but cannot connect to it, when I set up outlook it will not work if I type the name of the server, but if I type the ip address of it, it authenticates my username , but when I open outlook it says cannot open information store, im pretty sure it has something to do with not being able to connect to the server even through network neighborhood but dont know where to begin to fix this issue.

Thanks in advance for any and all help.

Are you logged into the domain when trying? Can you ping the email server by both it's name and address? My bet is either youre not logged into the domain or the name isnt resolving in which case an lmhosts file may help. I need them on some remote machines in my vpn and have yet to find out why..... try these and let me know how you make out.

Sound like domain issues. What version of outlook are you using. With Outlook 2k and up it has a wacky little authentication trick that can log you into a domain without MS networking.

Update, I can now use mail, what I had to do was add an entry to the "hosts.sam" file (located on the client machines) with the ip and the name of the exchange server. This seemed to fix the issue on the Win XP machines, but on the 9x machines I had to do that and add netbuei to the computer, anyway all is well now. I am using Outlook 2k and 2002 (xp) the only other issue ive seen is sometimes it kinda times out trying to use the server name to authenticate the mailbox, but in those cases I usually just type in the ip address and it works just fine.


Thanks for all the help.