I thought I would spend most of the day working on the laptop to get VPN working again and somehow it just didn’t seem important enough so I slipped off and had a nice Easter dinner and then spent some time trying to figure out exactly how many pair of socks I would need for a 6 day trip (I came up with 8 somehow…) and then chasing all over the place looking for my camera case and finally doing a water change on my tropical nano-tank so that my Pulsing Xenia’s wouldn’t be entirely lifeless when I got back home next weekend. You know the usual stuff. Trouble, the black cat with the appropriate name, seemed pleased with all of it except the suitcase packing. That gathered me some bad evil eye type glares and she sat on the suitcase at one point giving me the “and what EXACTLY do you think you are doing” stare. I just know she isn’t going to be talking to me when I come back, she never does for a day or so so she can let me know that I ticked her off. While it is certainly ok for her to go off on her own for awhile and hide in some corner of the house, if I am unavailable for a bit it is quite outrageous.
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So what is wrong with the laptop and more specifically VPN??? I still don’t know for sure. I am inches from a complete reload, just best to not do that just before I have to fly hundreds of miles away from a spare machine to work from.
I am now of the opinion though that it is somewhere in the Certificates/Encryption/Smart Card area. But what I don’t know. I was looking at the network traces and they offered no help, the whole point of VPN is to scramble the traffic and for the most part, I would say that is succeeding, now I just need to have it allow more traffic than a few handshake packets and a nice message of sorry, I can’t authenticate you.
So after dorking around with it for a bit I realized that the “instant passwords” the smart card software created on the laptop weren’t anywhere near what were being created on another machine. I don’t know exactly how it is supposed to work but if you pull several passwords you will tend to note that they are in a fairly close grouping. The laptop is WAY off in its numbers from what I saw on one other physical machine and two other virtual machines.  Of course this prompted reloading of PCMCIA card drivers, smart card software, etc. None of that worked.
So I get this bright idea, and when I say I get this bright idea think of that being said in a quite sarcastic way of one who is ready to start trying to make a nuclear device out of a toothpick, three sticks of doublemint gum, 2 ounces of maple syrup, and a piece of yarn just to get something accomplished… so this bright idea… Generate the password from a machine that is working and just type it into the VPN connection screen….
So I fire up the VPC XPSP2 session on the laptop and tell it to connect to the smart card reader and give me a password code… Oh wait, VPC doesn’t support PCMCIA cards… Ugh, load VMWARE Workstation? I would rather not thanks… Oh wait, get this, I TS (that is geek speak for use terminal services) into the local virtual XP workstation and tell the TS client to redirect my smartcard device. I then open the smartcard software in the TS session to the virtual machine running on the local physical laptop… Somehow this convoluted mess actually works! I tell it to generate an instant password number and I type that into the Contivity VPN window on the main laptop screen (i.e. not the TS to the virtual) and low and behold I connect to the network and mail starts flowing down to my machine….
Any thoughts on what is going on here would be greatly appreciated. Email me or hit the comments for this entry. I would rather not have to reload the machine but I am not really into smart cards and certificates and encryption and again, I think my problem is square in that realm based on the results of what I am doing here.
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