VPN for real Dummies

[lyster]

I'm a true newbie with VPNs. I have a Synology DiskStation as the VPN server, and various Windows (Win 7 and Windows Home Server - all 64-bit) machines at two locations. I've followed all the directions published by Synology (which is how I got to OpenVPN in the first place), and the Open VPN GUI says I've created a connection. Great! But.... Nothing else seems to have changed. The client machine has a VPN IP address, as does the server machine, and Open VPN says the machines are connected, but I don't see any way to access files on the server machine from the client machine. No indication in the network and sharing center on the client machine that anything happened at all -- other than there being a new unidentified public network there which is alive, well, and operating with no internet access. I'm getting tired looking at the screen and not knowing where to go from here.

[woelrutie]

I'm having the same issue. Let me know if you figure out how to get the vpn server up and running; in the meantime, I'll keep looking for a solution.

[lyster]

I switched to PPTP, which is supported by Microsoft and Apple in their operating systems, thinking that might solve the problem. It didn't.... but I kept trying all sorts of tweaks to the connection. I wish I could say I was scientific about what I did - but it was more alchemy than anything else. Eventually I was able to map a drive to the server machine (the Synology Diskstation) by manually typing in the name of the device and its "share" or directory (\\diskstation\documents). There were no clues elsewhere that this would work. I cannot do the same thing to any remote client machine - this is just a client to server sort of thing (not client to client).

There must be a way to make all these machines act as if they were truly in the same network.