Welcome to Matts Admin tips. This blog is full of little fixes, tutorials and work-arounds to those anoying problems that a Systems Administrator might face. If you find something that you have found useful please leave me a comment - I appreciate knowing that I've helped! Also, feel free to leave a comment if my tips or ideas don't work in your environment... I monitor them closely and would be happy to help! Matt

PPTP VPN not connecting (Error 800)

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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