One of the PCs on the LAN is often connected to a client's system using VPN. Whilst connected, that PC cannot be accessed on the LAN, nor can it access network printers etc. Would installing a second LAN card in the PC get around this?

Are the printers etc on the saem subnet as the PC ?

When you create the VPN I belive the default route will be pointed at the VPN connection - so the PC wont be able to access anything that isnt on its directly conected subnet.

You can either make sure the VPN doesnt grab the default route and add static routes for customer site to the VPN connection - or add static routes for the local servers via the local gateway.

Deano

Hi Fig,

I'm not quite clear as to why your losing your connection. My feeling is that the IP Addresses of the equipment on the VPN is on the same subnet as the equipment on your local network. ie 192.0.0.X on both LANS. If this is the case all local communications will get diverted to the VPN connection.

Having the LANs on seperate subnets should prevent this ie one on 192.0.0.X and the 2nd on 192.0.1.X this way all IP traffic will know which way it is going.

If the above isn't the case and you feel that having 2 LAN cards in your PC will solve your problem if it works, then I can tell you that I have run multiple LAN cards in PC's a few times, with both Win98 & XP with no trouble. Again they are going to have to be on seperate subnets as this is the method that Windows will determine which NIC network traffic goes to.

LAN is 192.168.x.x
VPN connection is to 3.x.x.x

Don't forget some VPN clients purposefully block IP traffic from the LAN to prevent nasty stuff being transferred site to site.

The cisco VPN client has this option for example, you can turn it on or off though.

The VPN client is "Contivity". Other than that I know very little about it, or the configuration.

It's likely that any communication expect the VPN is blocked when the VPN is in use. This is a common feature in VPN clients nowdays. The client is from Nortel.....

I would suggest that you discuss the issue with the IT people at the company your VPNing into rather than messing with the machine......