Re: AltaVista Tunnel

["Bruce B. Platt" <bbp () comport com>]

At 04:09 PM 10/14/97 -0500, Eric Dykema wrote:
> I'm getting ready to implement a VPN and one of the products being
> evaluated is AltaVista Tunnel 97.  We need to pass traffic to both UNIX
> boxes and PCs over the Tunnel.  I can't seem to do NetBEUI sessions over
> the Tunnel product.  The vendor claims that it's because our fwtk-based
> firewall won't pass UDP traffic, but the Tunnel documentation says that
> every packet is encrypted and encapsulated in a TCP packet before
> passing thru the firewall.  Therefore, I don't think I believe them.  I
> suspect the cause might be that NetBEUI is unroutable and can't be
> routed thru the Tunnel server.

We regularly mount NT-server based file shares across an AltaVista Tunnel.

We've used both the Unix and NT based versions of the AltaVista Firewall,
only required 
addition to the FW is a generic proxy for port 6666.

I am certainly NOT an expert on the fwtk based FW, but I am pretty certain
that the AltaVista
FWs are only passing TCP packets through the generic proxy.

What kind of problems are you having?  Is it a name to IP resolution issue?
We simplify things
by having LMHOSTS entries like:

192.168.5.5     inside.hq.comport.com

and then just use map disk drive commands from Explorer using syntax like
\\inside\diskd.

Works like a champ.  

I am assuming that you can ftp, web-browse, or other TCP stuff through fwtk
based FW over your tunnel,since you only mention you can't do NetBEUI.
 
If you can't do that, then look at your routing.  Most of the tunnel issues
I've seen are due to routes
being set up wrong.  

Regards,

Bruce






> Microsoft's PPTP _can_ do NetBEUI sessions over the tunnel, but I'd
> really rather not use it for reasons that don't need to be argued here.
> If my above stated suspicion is correct, then I don't know how M$ routes
> NetBEUI traffic thru their tunnel (and probably don't want to know).
> Does anybody have any ideas on AltaVista Tunnel?  Am I right or wrong?
> --------------------------------------------------
> Eric Dykema
> email: Eric_Dykema () sdsi com
> Network Administrator
> SDS, Inc.
> Oak Brook, IL  USA
> 630 368 0400 (voice)
> 630 990 8584 (fax)
> --------------------------------------------------
+-----------------------------------------------------+
Bruce B. Platt, Ph.D. Vice-President
Comport Consulting Corporation
78 Orchard Street
Ramsey, NJ 07446
Phone: 201-236-0505  Fax: 201-236-1335
bbp () comport com