Today, I was about to VPN into my company’s network, to connect to Exchange among other things.
Ok, Windows Vista Start Button – Connect To – … what? Where’s my VPN connection?
I tried the easy solution, creating a new connection and tried to fire it up. Bam! Instantly I was told that connection failed, and the Diagnose button in the message box that popped up didn’t work. So I rebooted, logged in, and tried it once more. Same thing happened.
Let’s turn the clock a couple of days back; In order to free up system resources, I had looked through the started NT services, and decided that some of them were redundant, so I turned them off / disabled them. One of the services was Telephony. I turned it off, since my computer doesn’t have any analog modem.
Well, it turns out that a lot of the RAS-related services depends upon this service. So since it was disabled, a lot of other services up the chain didn’t start properly.
So, after setting the startup mode to “Automatic” and starting service, my VPN connection reappeared in the Connect to a network dialog.
The morale of this story? Well, don’t just go about disabling a lot of system services without checking their dependency chains thoroughly.
