Lars Wilhelmsen » Windows+Vista http://www.larswilhelmsen.com Computer Software Guy Living Between the Edge and Corner Cases Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:05:06 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 The tale of the disappearing VPN connection http://www.larswilhelmsen.com/2008/08/30/the-tale-of-the-disappearing-vpn-connection/ http://www.larswilhelmsen.com/2008/08/30/the-tale-of-the-disappearing-vpn-connection/#comments Sat, 30 Aug 2008 13:40:40 +0000 larsw http://larsw.wordpress.com/2008/08/30/the-tale-of-the-disappearing-vpn-connection/ 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.

 Services.msc - Telephony service

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.

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