PPTP VPN not connecting (Error 800)

Posted September 15th, 2008 by Matt Shadbolt

My users logged a call this morning complaining that they couldn’t connect to the corportate VPN – PPTP running on RAS (Microsoft Small Business Server 2003). I tried to connect and found the same thing.

After restarting the RAS services I started to troubleshoot.

I tried everything from disabling/enabling the Miniport driver to deleting the PPTP config and starting again – all to no avail.

Running the Microsoft Port Query tool (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;310099) I found that the PPTP port 1723 was “ESTABLISHED” – this should be in “LISTENING” mode. This tells me that there is something running on the 1723 port that shouldn’t be – locking my users out.

I then used another great tool from sysinternals to find the process that was using my PPTP port. The tool is called TCPView and you can download it at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897437.aspx. TCPView told me that the connection on port 1723 was established by my SQL server and the exe that was using it was a BlackBerry service. I killed the process, restarted the RAS services and our PPTP VPN was now working.

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5 Responses to “PPTP VPN not connecting (Error 800)”

  • MikeP Says:
    December 11th, 2008 at 2:53 pm

    Hi there,
    did stopping the BlackBerry service screw up mail delivery to BlackBerry devices?
    Any othe rimpact ?
    I’m having the same problem with VPN etc as you described and found the PID was the BlackBerryAgent process, but I’m not sure how to make the two run in conjunction with each other.

  • mattshadbolt Says:
    December 11th, 2008 at 3:04 pm

    I don’t believe the BlackBerryAgent process should be using port 1723 as this is the PPTP port – killing the proc and restarting all the BES services seemed to fix the issue for me. Better yet give the server kick – this will ensure all the services are running on their correct ports.

  • Lynnette Says:
    July 20th, 2009 at 2:09 pm

    thanks !! very helpful post!

  • Tyson F. Gautreaux Says:
    March 6th, 2010 at 5:22 pm

    Thanks for this post, answers a bunch of questions I was having.

  • Trey Nolen Says:
    May 21st, 2010 at 2:52 am

    I ran into this same issue. I had figured out that it was talking to the SQL server by looking at netstat. Unfortunately, this problem comes back later and someone has to go in and shutdown BES and restart RAS. I’m trying to find out if there exists a way to exclude that port from the ones that BES tries to use.

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