HOLY CRAP!

Seven long hours of work later, and I FINALLY get my new web server to talk to my new SQL server. Geez man this was getting ridiculous. For whatever reason, after installing SQL on the server, I could not connect to it through EM on my local machine. The ports were wide open, but my EM was doing a really good Stevie Wonder impression. The web server couldn't see it either.

So, I started to set up a VPN connection. Gosh what a PITA that was. I set one up on my old network, and loved it to death. The only problem was, the server only had one network adapter, and you need 2 to have a VPN server. So I had a brilliant idea. Why not use the Microsoft Loopback Adapter as the second interface? Well, to my astonishment, it worked..... sorta.

I hadn't configured the server properly for VPN access. I had neglected to clear the checkbox that said “Only allow VPN traffic through this interface” when using the “Configure Your Server” wizard . Um, yeah bad idea. As soon as I tried to dial in, my sql box decided it didn't want to play with ANYONE, and I could no longer RDC into it. I tried using the nifty RapidReboot option that ServerBeach gives me on my console, to no avail. Lucky for me, when the server does not reboot properly, a trouble ticket is automatically issued and some superhero tech guy comes in and checks out the problem. When I woke up this morning, I had a nice e-mail saying that they disabled RRAS again and the server was online as normal.

So after messing around with the VPN settings again, I finally got everything working, and all my server are able to communicate properly. I like this setup even better, because now all my servers can see each other (they are all on different subnets), and I can firewall off all traffic to my database server except for RDC and DNS. And all my DB traffic will be secure.

Now on my to-do list is an entry on how to configure VPN using the same setup I just created. If configured properly, you can set up any machine to be a VPN server regardless of how many adapters you have installed.