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Connection Manager Administration Kit for Vista

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Curiosity got the better of me. When I was analyzing why Hyper-V Remote Management didn't always work over a VPN connection due to DNS the other day, I mentioned that I wasn't familiar with the replacement technology for CMAK in Windows Server 2003.

Well, I found it (but it was surprisingly well hidden) - the replacement is.... CMAK, in Windows Server 2008. The details of it are squirreled away in the depths of the Technet Library under Windows\Windows Server\Windows Server 2008\Networking.

It turns out, CMAK is a feature built into Windows Server 2008 - dead easy to install using Server Manager, and it can create profiles for Windows Vista and older operating systems.

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But I had to give it a try to see if it was possible to set the DNS suffix for a connection and ensure it was registered on the internal DNS servers when a VPN connection was established, thus ensuring Hyper-V Remote Management works correctly when on a VPN.

Sure enough, then you get to the "Create or Modify a VPN Entry", there is an advanced tab where the three fields needed are present.

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Never having used CMAK before, I found it very easy to use, at least for a basic VPN configuration - no custom actions and so forth - those would have been a bit of overkill for a home setup. And did it work? Yup, perfectly :)

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Cheers,
John.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Sylvain - TBH, I don't know, but I don't believe so as this is a feature of Windows Server. I'll see if I can find someone who has a definitive answer though. Thanks, John.

  • Anonymous
    December 05, 2008
    Hi, do you know if i can install CMAK on vista ?

  • Anonymous
    March 25, 2009
    Doesn't look like this work for Vista x64 :(