Cricalix.Net

Orange don’t know it yet, but I’m changing my pay-monthly phone to a PAYG phone this weekend.  I’ve finally succumbed to the lure (and allure) of the HTC Touch Pro, and acquired one on contract with Vodafone.  There are plenty of reviews on the ‘net already, so I’ll just remark this – I like it :)  As a geek, I’m really impressed with the ability of the phone to connect to Last.FM when I’m out and about (on the 3G connection).  I’m fairly sure that heavy use of this streaming would get Vodafone to notice (500 MB fair usage), but for walking in to work and so on, it’s brilliant.

I just need to get pocket PuTTY installed, and get the VPN connection to $work functioning, and I’ll have an SSH and RDP capable device that can connect from anywhere with a WiFi or 3G signal (in the UK at least, the Pro apparently isn’t quad-band).

I have a work-supplied laptop.  Until this week, whenever I activated the PPTP VPN to work, I was able to resolve all of our internal servers by DNS name.  This is good, it means I can navigate our network at work without remembering IP addresses.

This week I’m on call.  I had to VPN in to check out a failed Internet connection, and found to my horror that DNS resolution no longer worked.  I pondered for a moment, and then hard-coded the DNS server for the underlying network device to the work DNS servers and was able to get on with the job.

I’ve just been looking for what the heck has gone wrong; my home PC is able to open up the same VPN connection (I checked every single setting) and DNS resolution works.  What I found was a page describing a registry edit that fixes the problem.  Did said regedit, and presto, the VPN from the laptop works again.  The thing that bugs me is I don’t know how that setting got changed.  Mindboggling.

For the record, in case that page goes away, edit HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Linkage, double-click Bind and move the NdisWanIp entry to the top of the list.

Windows.  Feh.