hannah

I had some trouble at a client with RRAS on SBS Windows Server 2003 recently. I could not find the fix by searching and had to work it out. Poor me.
The Problem. VPN connects but the network you are connecting to is not reachable. You cannot ping any internal addresses and you cannot contact your email server or share drives. No traffic goes over the VPN.
In my case, I could ping an internal address for the first 30 seconds or so only after the VPN was connected.
By running ipconfig /all on the RRAS server, I could tell that the ppp adapter was getting an IP and then losing it 30 seconds later. It was assigning itself an APIPA address. These are always in the 169.254.0.0 range and since this is not going to be the range of a LAN, the LAN is not going to be available.
The fix in my case was to go the the General tab of the properties window for the server in Routing and Remote access and enable this computer as a router for LAN and demand dial routing. I think the idea is that the VPN adapter is another network interface that needs to get traffic from the DHCP server.
I think the problem might have been originally due to the server not having a statically assigned IP when I ran the wizard. Instead it was getting one from DHCP running on the same machine.

I needed to re-format an 80GB laptop drive in a usb enclosure. I wanted to use it with my car stereo which is a pioneer DEH-P4050UB that can read fat32 USB drives. The normal method of formatting a fat32 drive in xp only works to 32GB. There is a workaround using a program available here http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm. The trick involves giving the drive a letter in disk management WITHOUT FORMATTING and then running the application (donationware). It worked for me when I deleted the existing NTFS partition first and then followed the steps.

UPDATE
This was actually a mixed success. The Pioneer DEH-P4050UB head unit does not provide enough power for the USB drive. If i use one of those usb cables with the additional usb plug for extra power and plug that into a USB hub, then it works fine. I need to run power to the glovebox or else use the cigarette lighter socket all the time.