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My goal is to setup a VPN on my desktop for my home network to which I can connect my laptop when I am out in order to use a remote desktop.

My issue is that I cannot successfully connect to the VPN - and I'm not sure where I'm going wrong. I've followed various online tutorials and below I've detailed the steps I've taken.

First of all, I followed the tutorial here to setup a VPN with Windows 10's 'built-in' tool. This results in a new 'Incoming Connections' item in the Network Connections panel for which a new user (called 'VPN') has access (see image VPN user in Network Connection panel).

After this I've tried to setup port forwarding for port 1723 (which I believe is the port accessed when connecting to a VPN). Here is an image of my routers port forwarding screen image. I've set the protocol to TCP and UDP (available options are combinations of this).

Taking my LAN port (as found in ipconfig) to be 127.123.1.123 and my WAN port as found on ipv4.me to be 196.124.233.223 (both faked) I set the following:

  • WAN Host IP Address: 196.124.233.223 ~ 196.124.233.223
  • LAN Host: 127.123.1.123
  • WAN Port: 1723
  • LAN Port: 1723

My router is a ZTE H298A and my provider is Hyperoptic (UK). A screenshot of the port forwarding settings can be seen here: port forwarding screenshot

Finally, in my laptop I use the built in VPN settings to attempt to connect to the WAN ip address as seen here.

I'm not sure at which of the three steps I'm going wrong so all help is appreciated.

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  • You sure you have a device with 987.123.1.1xx as an address that doesn't seem right. This question should include more details and clarify the problem.
    – Ramhound
    Jan 23, 2021 at 15:35
  • Check and make sure that there’s correct Private IP address range and DHCP IP address reservation for the device you want to connect to, in the router. Your ISP might have blocked the VPN port. In Windows 10 you also need to specify the Private IP address range for the VPN devices and that should be within the DHCP address range of the router but not assigned to any of the devices that connect to router.
    – patkim
    Jan 23, 2021 at 16:40
  • Hi @patkim thanks for your response. I don't know how to check my Private IP address range or DHCP IP reservations. I've looked through my router settings and can't find reference to either. Do they maybe come under "firewall filter"? I've added some details and screenshots which hopefully clarify the input options available to me.
    – Aidan Wood
    Jan 26, 2021 at 20:46
  • Hi @Ramhound thanks for your reply. I've added details and screenshots which hopefully help. I've also clarified the mock IP addresses I provided previously.
    – Aidan Wood
    Jan 26, 2021 at 20:47
  • I am going to repeat my question. That LAN host address isn’t a legal address.
    – Ramhound
    Jan 26, 2021 at 22:08

1 Answer 1

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After having no luck solving my problem using the built in Windows VPN tool, I've managed to use Tailscale to setup a VPN (for free!).

After setting up an account with Tailscale I followed the instructions detailed here to allow the incoming RDP connection.

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