PPTPD on a Linode with a Windows 7 client: no gateway IP

While this is not specifically helpful to your problem (and I apologize for that), it looks like you're using the wrong tool for this. PPTP is pretty uncommon these days due to the difficulty of configuration compared to other solutions, the use of GRE rather than TCP or UDP (GRE has no ports, so NAT forwarding is difficult), etc.

SSH tunnels, for example, enable you to do what you describe with almost no effort at all, without worrying about routing; just forward a port (say, 80) on your server to a port (say, 80) on your local machine; clients connecting to port 80 on your server will be served from your desktop, and you can use compression on the SSH tunnel to boot.

Okay, thanks for the response.

Could you point me in the direction of a guide on how to do that? :o I've tried searching - but guides I've found (even on the Linode library) just cover how to make it so you can access remote ports locally instead of the other way around.

If anyone can suggest anything for PPTP that would be great, but if I can get SSH tunnelling working I can live with that!

Give this a whirl, I found it after a quick google http://www.jonlee.ca/how-to-secure-your … ith-putty/">http://www.jonlee.ca/how-to-secure-your-traffic-using-an-ssh-tunnel-with-putty/

Thanks.

That guide is just like the other guides I found though - I'm not particularly wanting to browse the Internet using my Linode's connection, rather allow people to connect to a port on my Linode and have that forwarded to my local computer.

Is that possible using SSH tunnelling?

That's why I was trying to setup a PPTP VPN, I recently moved and am using an Internet connection that shares the same IP with the entire block - which is fine for normal web browsing, but if I want to host a web server for testing locally and allow people to connect to it (for example) I can't.

Ah sorry mis-read, in a linux environment I'd simply suggest tunnelling backwards, however I've no idea how to do that on windows since I don't use it. Maybe someone here who has more experience with windows can help.

Using PuTTY, one of the more common SSH tools for Linux:

http://www.cs.uu.nl/technical/services/ … ttyfw.html">http://www.cs.uu.nl/technical/services/ssh/putty/puttyfw.html

That's for a forward tunnel rather than reverse, but the idea is similar.

PuTTY tends to be a bit more short-term (doesn't reconnect if connection is lost, shows up in the taskbar), but there are other clients intended for long-term tunnels or connections.

One kind of hacked-up solution to that might be putting plink in a batch script that infinitely loops, assuming plink will terminate when the connection is lost.

A more proper permanent solution might be autossh in cygwin, ptunnel, tunnelier, etc.