Open rasphone
and click the Connect button and you will connect successfully to your VPN connection even though it doesn't show up in the Network Connections
.
Here is a more detailed explanation.
I found out online that Windows 7 has a less user friendly command line method for handling VPN related issues. There are two command line tools specifically:
rasdial
used for connecting to a VPN that is already created
rasphone
used for creating/editing a VPN connection
When I tried rasphone
I found out that there were many existing VPN connections already created. Everytime I tried creating a new VPN connection there was an entry being shown in the rasphone
listing!
rasphone
has the following features:
- GUI pull down to list all VPN connections previously created (in my case they were all created from the
Network and Sharing Center
- GUI button to Connect/Disconnect/shows-status
- GUI properties button
- GUI new button
- Screenshot
Solution:
- To connect/disconnect: open
rasphone
click the connect/disconnect button
- To edit the VPN connection: open
rasphone
click the Properties button
- To delete a VPN connection is a little more tricky
- each VPN connection is stored in a text file with extension *.pbk
- there are two *.pbk files that
rasphone
looks at when you open it
- user's *.pbk file located at:
C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Network\Connections\Pbk\rasphone.pbk
- system *.pbk file located at:
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Network\Connections\Pbk\rasphone.pbk
- In my case there were many redundant VPN connections so I edited the *.pbk file and deleted the redundant VPN connections in both files
- I left only the most recent VPN connection that I had successfully connected to
- you can edit the *.pbk file manually however I wouldn't recommend it unless you are intimately familiar with what is valid/invalid edits to the key/value pairs and so if you aren't an expert you may break what you are trying to edit