Boss' Dell laptop won't work with home Tiscali broadband

MarcLister

MarcLister

MarcLister

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My boss has a Dell laptop that she uses at home to dial-in to her work computer so she can work from home. She's been having trouble getting the wireless (I think the wireless) to work with the Tiscali router she and her husband have got.

Her husband is fairly decent with IT but he's not been able to solve the issue and she's asked me to look into it. I'm going to ring Dell on Monday morning to see if they've got any ideas or have heard of other Dell laptop users experiencing the same things with Tiscali.

I was wondering if anyone here has had the same problem or has had to fix it for someone else and knows what I could do to get things working again.

I've got her husband to check the network connections and proxy settings and they're OK so without ringing Dell or getting new information I'm at a loss. Any help or suggestions would be most useful. :)
 
heres a few to try first

  • her ip addressing range is the same as your works ? eg 192.168.1.*/24 on both networks
  • her firewall is incorrectly set up ?
  • vpn in correctly set up eg. ipsec or pptp ?
  • possible port forwarding needed for ssh etc ?
  • due to her using a dynamic ip maybe your isa or firewall aint playing ball ? maybe dyndns is needed?
 
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mglover070588 said:
Sounds like you want to go over to hers and fix her internet.

...and when I say 'fix her internet' I mean 'have sexy time'.

;)
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Couldn't be further from the truth. :D It's another colleague I'd like to impress if you must know. ;) The lady I'd like to impress is younger than me, single and a genuine MILF. :cool:

pennywise said:
Could be locked to only connect to her work VPN?
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Hmm could be. Doubt it. We're a little primary school. :D

Schizophonic said:
Is she using a VPN token?
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Don't think so. See above. I don't know of any VPN stuff like that at our place. Doesn't mean we don't have one, for the office staff and headteacher/deputy head to use. It just means I've not been told about it. :D Quite fun that, having to support colleagues with problems with technologies I've only just been told we have because I've just been told it isn't working.

knowlesy said:
heres a few to try first

  • her ip addressing range is the same as your works ? eg 192.168.1.*/24 on both networks
  • her firewall is incorrectly set up ?
  • vpn in correctly set up eg. ipsec or pptp ?
  • possible port forwarding needed for ssh etc ?
  • due to her using a dynamic ip maybe your isa or firewall aint playing ball ? maybe dyndns is needed?
Click to expand...
Nice list. I'll ask her on Monday exactly how she connects to our school computers.

One problem we have is that as the IT guy I'm meant to know stuff but I picked this job up after the person who set it all up left so I only know stuff I find out. Anything else that I need to know normally means no-one knows it. :( Which makes job quite hard at times when its a simple password I need and no-one knows what it is. :rolleyes: One of my biggest problems is that I know the questions to ask in situations like this but the people I need to give me the answers don't always know them so a lot of your list will just go over peoples' heads meaning I'm no closer to solving the problem.

I don't even know how long this problem has been around and how long my boss has had Tiscali at home. I think its been since her old school laptop broke and she got a new one. The current laptop is a Dell, the previous one wasn't so I believe the only thing that has changed is the make of laptop which makes me think there's some weird compatibility issue with Dell and Tiscali. Logically I can't see what it is but as far as I know the only factor to have changed is the laptop.
 
that sucks big style dude!

iirc if you have a beasty router, this acting as the vpn server or if you have ISA for instance you can check the rule where vpn traffic is directed too, or it may be on the ISA server itself, it'll be listed in the server management console of your servers iirc on 2k8 it's under a different name but the description basically a describes a vpn, but if its 2k3 it says vpn in the name

if the old laptop broke is it possible to get it up and running again to find the settings. it may be its never worked and they dialled in at school or something changed when the other guy left and he shut down the vpn or they have a separate login or changed servers or credentials etc chances are they probably didnt use it until recently and there's been a change.

if you can, a suggestion would be to spend an hour extra a night after school on your servers and machines to get to the bottom of everything make a few visio diagrams, network layouts etc ? then it helps you establish a few things and troubleshoot as tbh everyone forgets :D
 
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It does knowlesy. More than you know. ;)

Our county contracts out ICT support to several companies depending on what they do. Website hosting, internet access etc. So I have no hardware at school that controls the VPN because its all off-site contracted out.

This feels like it could be one of those issues where no one technology/company is at fault and I'm going to have to spend quite some time talking to different people getting nothing sorted.

I don't know where the old laptop is but I think it was pretty much unusable so even if I found it I doubt I'd be able to get any settings off it for comparison with the new one.

So how does it suck more than you know? How about I work one day a week? Normally Thursdays but I'm doing Monday instead this week so that the laptop problem can get fixed. And it doesn't stop there! Oh no. :D I'm leaving in two weeks at Easter, or two days depending how you see it. So far the school hasn't arranged a replacement for me yet so one day a week and two days before I leave mean the boss wants this sorted before I go to pastures new. :p
 
jesus, that sounds like a pickle!

if its all contracted out, just go in and give the people who gave you your vpn box a beasting. Oh if your sharing your internet with other schools and have all the net going through one company normally the council or some other company, that they've all struck a deal with to enable cross site sharing of information, their firewall may be stopping you ?

either way sir i bid you good luck on resolving this, its always crap to leave on unfinished jobs like this :)
 
It is a bit, isn't it? :p Btw how did you know my nickname? Have we met?! :eek::D

We don't have a VPN box. I work in the cupboard (no really) where the Internet connection comes in and its just a big network cupboard on the wall, with a mess of tangled cables and some switches. No VPN on site.

Surely if the old laptop worked and the new one doesn't it hints at the laptop being the problem? And from what I've been told the boss can't connect to the VPN or remote access at all, not just the Internet as a whole. Mustn't that exclude the VPN, firewalls etc being the problem if she can't connect to even the school computers which surely should be OK? I believe a program has to be installed on a teacher's laptop to allow them to dial-in to the school network so I'm thinking that the county network, or the contractors network, is set up to allow any laptop access to the network providing it has the correct program installed and valid authentication details?

Like I say this is just a big mess and its going to take me most of Monday to get anything sorted I think. It won't help that the boss will be busy all day so if I need to ask her questions on certain issues/aspects that I may become aware of during the day and my conversations with the relevant IT people I won't be able to.
 
Thinking about it I think my boss has tried to connect the laptop directly to the router, i.e. with a cable and it doesn't work. She can't access the Internet on her laptop so she's not using the VPN software or trying to access the school computers; she's just trying to access the Internet from home.
 
ah right if she cant access the net, then im guessing her firewall may of detected a "new network" and she hasnt clicked on the correct settings or somthing along those lines ?

looks like its just the laptop then ?....well lets hope its just that :D
 
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