PPTP VPN Problems with Vista SP1 and ZoneAlarm
ByYesterday I advised a customer who is a remote VPN/Terminal Services user to upgrade to Vista SP1 in order to make "Terminal Services Easy Print" available.
After the installation of SP1 the user was not able access the corporate VPN.
When trying to connect Vista hangs at "Verifying username and password" and eventually shows an 828 error. On the server side event 20209 was logged.
There is a discussion on the ZA forums as to where the blame lies for the problem but there does not seem to be a clear answer.
For the sake of simplicity, I have found that:
On Vista SP1 machines with version 7.1.248 of ZoneAlarm free installed PPTP VPN connections to Windows 2003 Based RRAS servers do not work. Also note that disabling ZoneAlarm does not help. Uninstalling the product solved the issue immediately.
Always a pain when you try to solve one problem and create another in the process. On a positive note Terminal Services easy print in Windows 2008 worked really well once we got the user reconnected.
Thank you!!! I was having the exact same issue. I was using Vista with SP1 and the version of ZoneAlarm you mentioned. I already tried adding the VPN server to the trusted zone and disabling ZoneAlarm but to no avail. I concluded that ZoneAlarm couldn’t be the problem. I guess I was wrong because VPN worked again like a charm after uninstalling ZoneAlarm.
Thanks so much! I was starting to think that my Linux server may in fact be fallible. But no, the problem was of course on Windows’ end. Ironically there was an old notice from MS that ZA broke PPTP on Win2k, but that was supposedly resolved in v2.6 o ZA. I wonder if 8.x fixes this…? I downgraded to 7.x because 8.x had its own severe problems (interfering with shutdown and sleep and such). Anyway, no firewall for me for now. Good thing I’m behind my iptables.