If it's not clear by now, I'm not a Mac user. Things with the Mac OS
frustrate me much quicker than Windows, DOS, Unix or anything else.
I have a Windows 2000 Server at work which provides VPN access for me
and the rest of my users. You connect to it by firing up any vanilla
VPN client, pointing the IP to 'secure.xyzcompany.com' and entering
your Domain username/password. Viola. You're on. You can resolve server
names, access internal web-applications, or even check your email via
the Exchange protocal instead of using IMAP over SSL. It's magical and
it's slick, everyone loves it. Except me and my new Mac. When I connect
with my windows box, there's an option to "use the remote gateway".
This makes sense to me, because I know what a gateway is, and I even
know why I would want to disable that. It's also in a very convenient
and logical place. You open the properties of the VPN connection, find
the networking page of the config, select Internet Protocol from the
connction items, then click properties. Of course we want to be using
Automatic IP and DNS via DHCP, but I also have all my advanced
properties just a button click away, There's the checkbox for my
use default gateway. The Mac Setup however is somewhat more crazy. They
have this little application called "internet Connect" within the
Applications folder. You make your VPN, and then you're supposed to
know that you access options from a menu called Connect. Wait, connect
means connect, not Options for connections... WTF?! Send all traffic
over VPN connection? Um, yeah... call me crazy, but isn't the standard
name for sending traffic to a different endpoint called the "gateway".
So much for standard names.
So. The problem would be solved, except that I still can't resolve
names with my mac. For instance, the public DNS namespace of the
company is XYZCompany.com. The internal namespace is XYZCOMPANY.LOCAL.
This way, you HAVE to have acess to the internal nameservers to get any
good info out of us. Works great with windows, where when your primary
connection's DNS fails to resolve, windows looks at the other
connection's DNS servers for some useful info. For some reason, Mac
forgot this nicety. Sigh. Anyone who knows how to make this work could
certainly email me and show me the error of my ways.
EDIT
You can actually add resolvers for the lookupd process to go through by adding plain text files to /etc/resolver/
this directory doesn't exist by default, and you don't have access to it if you're not currently root
Enable the root account via the NetInfo Manager application in /Applications/Utilities.
Name the file XYXDomain.EXT and add lines as follows
XYZDomain.com <-- filename
XYZDomain.com <-- root domain, same as filename
subdomain.XYZDomain.com <-- optional subdomains, one or more
10.10.20.3 <-- domain server IP
After creating this file, kill the lookupd process from the shell, use the gui activity process, or, because you're lazy, just reboot. Of course, one really should use this as an excuse to bust out the good old fashioned vi or emacs and go to town. *I'm a vi guy*. Eww. Flex those command line brain muscles! Now, question why you did that. Requirement? no. Feels good to be a geek and do it for the implicit sake of it. Yeah.