Thread: Work Domain Network vs Home Workgroup Problem

wanjos@cybercircle.co.uk wrote:
> I work from home using a DELL D800 Latitude laptop with XP
> Professional. I log on to my work domain using cached authentication
> and VPN into the office over ADSL to access work resources. I also
> have a home network (workgroup, not domain) of a few machines. One in
> particular I use as a Print server and backup machine.
>
> The problems is that when I cannot vpn into the office, I cannot
> connect to my local machine - I lose access to the printer and
> drives. Accessing the drive gives the following message: 'M:\ is not
> accessible. The system detected a possible attempt to compromise
> security. Please ensure that you can contact the server that
> authenticated you.' So the system wants me to check with my work
> server to get permission to acces my home machine.
>
> I have created a user on my home PC that has the same name and
> password as my work PC and I have tried turning simple file sharing on
> and off.
>
> Does anybody know how I can get my work PC to be able to access my
> home network without domain authorisation or having to log in locally?

My first question is, do you always work from home? If you access the
corporate domain only via VPN, does it really make sense for your computer
to belong to the domain at all? If your machine will never actually be on
the same network as a DC (and a VPN client doesn't generally count as such)
I don't really see why it should; you don't get the benefits/group
policy/password change ability/etc for the most part, and the corporate IT
folk can't centrally manage your computer ...what's the point?

Anyway - what VPN client are you using? I'm presuming from your post that
you manually enable the VPN connection & use it on demand. When you 'can't
connect' via VPN, can you even ping the other (local) machine? Do you have
an IP address from the remote server (ipconfig /all) at the time? What if
you log out / back in? If you're simply booting up and logging in with
cached credentials, and can connect to your home network initially - but
then your manually-initiated VPN connection fails - I can't see how it would
then remove your ability to access any local resources.

Are you using a login script, or persistent mapped drives? I would go with
the former (and probably manually run it after enabling the tunnel to map
drives to the remote domain servers). E.g.,

net use x: /del
net use x: \\remoteserver\share /persistent:no
net use y: /del
net use y: \\remoteserver\anothershare /persistent:no

[....and if you don't belong to the domain, you could append this after the
2nd line:
/userOMAIN\username
which would prompt you for your domain password once, and the credentials
would persist throughout the session]

Seems to me that a lot of your problems might simply disappear if you didn't
belong to the domain. Surely you can have a local login and provide domain
credentials for the resources you need to access, once your VPN tunnel is
established. I log in remotely via VPN to several of my clients' networks
and my computer doesn't belong to their domains; it belongs to my own. It
just might make things a lot simpler.

HTH.