oozenoz

I apologize if this seems a little too basic; I have no intention of trying to insult your education level, I just have no idea how much experience you have with networks and I'd rather be overly simple than possibly confuse you and have to backtrack. I also assume the user is working from a laptop...

I'd look into the following to start:

Run a netstat on the laptop while connected and running the softphone at the office, look for something resembling this:

TCP laptop:27055 10.x.x.x:1720 ESTABLISHED

This is from my own laptop while running the softphone. 10.x.x.x is the IP for my clan card, 1720 is the port I'm using to run the software (avaya default by the way).

Then have the user run a 'telnet x.x.x.x 1720' (or use the port found in the previuos step) from the laptop while connected from home via VPN. This will emulate what the software is attempting to do - if it cannot connect you have a potential firewall or routing problem. (You can try running PING or TRACERT as well but those are most likely going to be blocked.)

Are you using the actual clan IP address or a DNS name in the login settings of the softphone client? Even when connected to a vpn, if you have more than one DNS server the laptop may not be resolving the clan's name properly. If necessary, add the clan's name/ip to the laptop's host table (location should be C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc, if it's running XP).

Try these then report back.

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- calvin