This Guide will walk you through the process of setting up a VPN server role on Windows XP Professional

Lets get started

Start by firing up your Windows XP machine and make sure you are logged in as an Administrator

You will have wanted to already set a static IP on the machine that will be acting as your VPN server

Please reference my other guide on how to set a static IP, if it is not up yet Google can be your best friend

Open your “Network Connections” and click on the file menu to select “New Connection”

A quick way to get there is to type “NCPA.CPL” in your run command box

You will want to “Set up an advanced connection” click next

Select “Accept incoming connections” click next

Click next again without selecting anything then select “Allow virtual private connections” and click next

On the following page you will select the users and / or groups to grant access to

Make sure the user account has a password set because VPN does not allow for blank passwords

On the following page we will select next again followed by finish

You can now see the connection in your network connections box

Right click on the icon and select properties

Select the “Networking tab and click the “Properties” button while you have “Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)”

From here we can use DHCP to give out the address to the remote computer or alternatively we can specify a range for the remote computers

This can be useful for many reasons which I wont get into on the setup guide

You can test your VPN from another machine on the network by following my VPN connection setup guide and entering the IP of the newly created VPN server

I will cover this in the Client Configuration article

Enjoy