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VPN, group policy, and best practices?

Hello,

I am helping a friend/client install RMS and Headquarters, with the clients being located at mall kiosks in several cities and Headquarters at their home office. I've never worked with RMS before, so I have some questions on "best practices".

My client would like to:

1)Have kiosk employees seemlessly send data back to Headquarters without having to get too technical. 2)Control kiosk (pc) desktops with group policy 3)Use a wireless cellular data plan for kiosk internet connection 4)Use Remote Desktop for remote administration of kiosks 5)Use their SBS 2003 server to host RMS and Headquarters and domain.

We are running into some issues, and I'm not sure if we're even headed in the right direction.

My initial proposition was to use a vpn to log in to the domain and receive group policies in order to lock down the desktop kiosks. Ideally, the VPN would also facilitate a simple method of data transfer from the RMS clients to Headquarters. Is this even a suitable solution so far? If there are better practices, please advise.

The solution seems to work so far, and accomplishes all of my clients desired goals except being able to use Remote Desktop to administrate kiosk. My client says that as soon as the kiosk connects to the VPN, all network connections (including internet access) are routed through the VPN connection. He was trying to set up remote desktop and decided to use TZO (dynamic dns service) to enable a remote desktop, since the Verizon connection is dynamic. The problem is that TZO says that his IP address is his private address (192.168.1.X). He called TZO and they said because of the VPN, all his internet traffic is being routed through the VPN and not going directly out through the Verizon gateway.

It just seems like this is not a very elegant solution, but I'm concerned that a DSL line would get the same results because the VPN takes over. Any thoughts? Short of installing a DC global catalog at each site with a kiosk, is there another way to get both group policy going and transfer seemlessly data to Headquarters? I feel like we're missing something...

Thanks!

Sol

Reply to
SolRodriguez
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If your client is also VPN'd into the server (or physically sitting at the server) he should be on the same local network as the kiosks. Have you added the kiosks to SBS03's Computers list? If so, you should be able to enter the computer name into Remote Desktop to access it instead of mucking around with a dynamic dns service. Likewise, you should be able to use the 192.168.1.xxx address in Remote Desktop if your client is VPN'd into the server.

SolRodriguez wrote:

Reply to
Forkbeard

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