my knowledge of firewalls and vpn connections is limited, so i'm doing the best i can with what information i can find. i am the only it guy for a small hospital, and i've only been here a few short months. i'm trying to create a vpn connection from my laptop so that i can remote in, instead of having to drive in 45 minutes from home whenever i get a call at 2:00 on sunday morning (which has happened a couple of times already).

i followed all of the above steps for setting up this connection, and i'm getting this same problem (a couple posts above) with the gvc hainging in the "connecting" state. in the log i'm getting the following messages:

failed to find mac address 00:60:73:xx:xx:xx:xx in the system interfaces table.
starting isakmp phase 1 negotiation.
an error occurred
the peer is not responding to phase 1 isakmp requests.

every several seconds, the messages will repeat. any ideas?

just for fun, i tried pinging both the wan ip and the domain name form outside the network. the ip timed out, and the domain name could not be resoloved.

correct me if i'm wrong, when the connection wizard in the gvc requests an ip address, is it not referring to the wan ip address located under the network tab of the sonicwall web interface? the fact that i cannot ping it might explain the messages in the log, why i can't connect. but the question is then, why would i not be able to ping that ip? is there something in my firewall configuration that needs to be changed? any help that i can get here would be greatly appreciated.