Hi, can someone give me a quick tutorial on how to setup a VPN connection using my current ASL 4 box? I poked around a bit but couldn't find anything. Thanks
My own experience with W98, both original and SE, has been disappointing when trying to do PPTP to ASL. The connection establishes just fine once encryption is set up (and ONLY if you've loaded the DUN 1.4 upgrade from MS); once the connection was running I was able to ping and telnet across the connection without problems. However, as soon as I tried to use a browser either to read intranet pages or access port 5800 VNC, the connection would spontaneously disconnect and bring up a "redial" dialog box. Never did get that problem resolved.
However, I have had no such problem with either W2K or XP clients, so I'm convinced that the issue was ASL plus W98.
In this day and age (i.e. the last 4 years or so), if you wish to run a modern version of Microsoft Windows that can function as a proper VPN client, your best bet is to run WinXP pro, or at least Win2K pro.
The current 32-bit versions of Windows will network properly.
The old Win9x 16-bit versions of Windows were juryrigged on top of MSDOS, and it is a wonder that they were at all capable of supporting multitasking and a network stack. They did it, but did it quite poorly. For anyone who hasn't already done so, it is time to dump Win9x in favour of something newer.
All Win9x ever really was, was a desktop explorer shell implementation and Microsoft's Win32s 32-bit extension code grafted on to Windows 3.x from 15 years ago. And Win3x was grafted on top of the single tasking MSDOS from more than 20 years ago.
Good riddance to it all, I say!
ASL's VPN capabilities works flawlessly with the built-in VPN clients in the modern Windows implementations. I have used it successfully with Win2K/XP/2K3. For anyone who still has old Win9x machines, get rid of them. If they lack sufficient CPU power, disk space and RAM to be upgraded to WinXP, then either install Linux on them or throw them away. Those old machines no longer owe you anyrhing.