iPhone to Windows 7 PPTP VPN DNS resolution broken?

Question

Hi - I have a Windows 7 desktop at home, which is setup to accept incoming PPTP VPN connections. This server has a static address of 192.168.0.105.

I can connect successfully to this via my iPhone's built-in PPTP VPN client. My iPhone is always given the address 192.168.0.170 (I have specified that only one connection is allowed, and the DHCP is limited to this one address).

At home, I also have D-Link NAS drive (192.168.0.108). The DNS name for this is DNAS.

From my desktop, I can ping DNAS, no problems. From my iPhone, I can only ping it using it's IP address.

Does anybody know how to force Windows to allow PPTP clients to use it's DNS settings or to manually add an entry?

I have tried forcing it in the hosts file already, but as suspected, it makes no difference.

Thanks in advance to anybody that can shed some light on this - I've looked everywhere for some tips!

Phil

Answer 1

PPTP - point to point tunnelling protocol

VPN - virtual private network



DNS is not getting distributed, and to be honest unless you set up a DNS relay agent, you won't have much more that the address of the common DNS server. I suspect that the trafiic you are intending for your NAS drive is just being sent to your default gateway through the PPTP and dropped as there is no route configured to return this traffic to the NAS, DNS or no DNS.



You could add a static route in netsh in Windows to send this traffic to the NAS, but this isn't ideal as computer would have to be on to work.And really you just want DNS to work.



IPhone static route to 192.168.0.108 ,having a host name resolves it to a address, but that doesn't mean it has a ROUTE to actually get there. Um I don't have a IPhone.....bit of research....you'll need to get a terminal open in your IPhone and use a command ' route add 192.168.0.108 -p' i.e. persistent....confirm this with 'route print route -p ' I don't have a Iphone to test this on.



To be honest I don't think the IPhone is making a routing decision this might resolve it but if traffic still gets pushed to router it might be dropped as the router is not aware it needs to be forwarded if the IPhone has rewritten its destination address to the default gateway. So DNS record/ host file is ignored and default gateway is used, and the router doesn't resolve the query as it doesn't know and traffic is dropped.

Answer 2

Iphone Vpn Dns

Answer 3

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Answer 4

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Answer 5

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