Access Parallels guest OS from remote client via VPN

Hi,

I've set up the OS X (Leopard) VPN on my host machine, which is running Windows and Ubuntu in Parallels. Both guest OSes use bridged ethernet since this enables me to access them from other clients in the network (perhaps this is possible with shared networking as well, but I wasn't able to get it to work). So the guest OSes have IP addresses in the same subnet as the host machine (192.168.1.*).

When I access the VPN remotely, I can see the host machine at 192.168.1.2, open a remote shell, share the screen, etc. But I can't ping or otherwise access Windows and Ubuntu at 192.168.1.5 and 192.168.1.6. Probably this is due to my faulty understanding of how the VPN works. Shouldn't I be able to access the guest OSes over the VPN since they act as normal clients in the network?

Thanks for any help,
Matt

 

Do you mean you installed VPN server or configured VPN client?

 

Sorry, should have been clearer about that. I'm running a VPN server and I want to be able to access guest OSes on the server machine when I access it using a VPN client. I expected it to "just work" since both Windows and Ubuntu are using bridged ethernet under Parallels (on the server), but neither IP address is even visible to ping from the VPN client.

 

Is OS MAc OS server, or you are using custom VPN server ?

 

It's the OS X VPN (configured using iVPN). I don't have OS X Server but it turns out even normal Leopard has a VPN server built in, it just lacks the admin utility that ships with OS X Server.

 

Please check this thread http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=19379

 

That's a different issue though. In that thread, the user is running a VPN client on the machine that is running Parallels. They are using that VPN client to log into a VPN running on a server somewhere else. They want to be able to access the VPN from the guest OS as well but that isn't working for them.

In my case, I am running a VPN server on the machine running Parallels. I can log into that server from a remote client and access the VPN. But, although my guest OSes on the server are configured to used bridged ethernet and look like normal clients on the LAN, I can't see them from that remote client when I log into the VPN.

Make sense?

 

In every VPN server, there should be a feature allow/disallow access to local network
At list in Linux and in Windows RRAS server, try to find out such feature

 

Finally figured this one out. It seems that this is an issue with physical clients on the LAN as well. The solution is to make sure that the VPN service is at the top of the service list in the OS X network preferences.