Graves on SOHO Technology

Sometimes the apparently simple, little things take longer than you’d expect. In my recent travels I’ve had some trouble when trying to VPN connect back to my home office. This generally happens for one of two reasons;

1. The ISP at the remote location is blocking related ports
2. The network at the remote location is on the same subnet range as my home office network

The first cause is something that I simply cannot control, but the second is something that I decided to address today. I moved my entire network onto a new subnet.

The process is simple enough. Make the required changes in the m0n0wall router and reboot just about everything. As much as possible I leave network devices with DHCP enabled and the reserve IP addresses in the routers DHCP server. Even so some things need hand tweaking.

For example, my wife tried to make a call only to find no dial tone on the house phone. It turns out that the Sipura SPA-2002 that we use with that phone had a hard coded DNS server entry. Oops. Gotta change that manually then dial tone returns.

Just to be safe I rebooted a lot of things and confirmed that they were back on the network and working correctly. I expect that we have more on-LAN devices than most homes. The process took a couple of hours.