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Shay_ca
Shay_ca
New Member
September 14, 2016
Question

Accessing Network Shares over VPN by name instead of IP

  • September 14, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 24394 views

Hello,

 

When we connect to the VPN out of office, it connects just fine. We can only get to the network shares by entering \\192.XXX.XXX.XXX instead of how we could do it in the office \\FILESHARE

 

How can we get it so the VPN will take the network path name instead of just the IP address?

 

We have a fortinet 300D if that makes a difference.

    1 reply

    ede_pfau
    SuperUser
    ede_pfau
    SuperUser
    September 15, 2016

    hi,

    and welcome to the forums.

     

    Apparently, your DNS is not configured correctly on the client. First of all, are we talking about IPsec VPN or SSLVPN? So which DNS have you set? Your HQ DNS will probably be able to resolve a local hostname to a (private) IP address, like in "ping myserver".

    Now you would want to use the HQ DNS if connected via VPN but not if running in standalone mode. You can configure DHCP over IPsec which not only assigns a (private) IP address to the client but changes the DNS to use as well.

     

    It may as well be that you use the internal DNS on the client, but the client doesn't append your local domain name.

    Finally, it would make much sense to read up on Windows name resolution (via DNS, NetBIOS, local hosts file) to craft a solution.

    Ralph1973
    Ralph1973
    New Member
    September 15, 2016

    You need to add dns suffix to your client vpn address assignment, like

    config vpn settings

    set dns-suffix companyname.local

     

    Regards,

    Ralph

    Shay_ca
    Shay_caAuthor
    New Member
    September 15, 2016

    I got it resolved using these in CLI:

    [ul]
  • config vpn ipsec phase1-interface
  • edit <name of VPN>
  • set domain <AD domain>
  • set ipv4-dns-server1 <ip of DNS server>
  • end[/ul]

    Running each of those with the correct info made it work for us. Not sure why this info is not available anywhere online. Hope it helps someone in the future.

     

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