Quickbooks and Firewall

[kiddagoat]

I am at an office trying to setup a VPN such that when associates are not in the office, they can remote and work as if they are there. They use Quickbooks for invoices and all business related works.



I have setup Hamachi as the VPN and it seems to be working, all clients can connect and the VPN is functioning because I see all file shares that are necessary.



When I try to have one of their out of town associates remote in, he can connect to the VPN but when trying to access the Quickbooks company file I keep getting an error message saying:



"Cannot communicate with the company file." Then it goes onto say it could be a firewall issue.



I had the remote gentleman configure his home router to forward the required ports and even turn off his software firewalls. The error still occurs. The firewall at the office is a NetVanta 7100. I was thinking just for testing purposes to put the host machine on the DMZ and see if it works then.



Otherwise I am going to have the office get a seperate router and switch to do their computer networking on.



He has a T1 coming in for VOIP and a DSL coming in for the internet. Both are going into the NetVanta box. Would moving the internet to a seperate thing interrupt his VOIP??

 

[Brian_tii]

Check name resolution... Quickbooks I believe tries to find the "server host" by name and not by IP. If you're in a DHCP environment then this is many times less than reliable to begin with. When you're remote via VPN a lot of the clients won't use the same DNS servers and won't see any netbios traffic since they end up on a different segment. I'd try static IP addresses (esp for the "server") and maybe putting them in a host file. That's def helped me in the past with dealing with Quickbooks.

 

[kiddagoat]

Could you possibly provide me with an example how to do this??? I am good with most home networking but this stuff has me at a loss. I understand most of that but dunno how to apply it.

 

[Brian_tii]

This KB should help, it gives you the location of the hosts file, as well as how to modify it:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923947

 

[kiddagoat]

Okay I found the hosts file and made the following entry:

10.10.10.111 SUNDISK1 # Quickbooks Server




Is that entry correct??? Do I have to do that for all the clients as well???

I edited the hosts file on the "server" just so you know.

 

[Brian_tii]

Yeah, need it on the clients too, and need to set the IP address of the "server" statically so it's always 10.10.10.111

 

[compucare]

How do you discern what to name your Quickbooks server? Is this by computer name? So if my server is Joe-PC I just make a hosts entry like:

5.5.11.110 Joe-PC

and that should work (assuming all else is the same)? (I am a bit vague on the other syntax provided in your example (i.e. "...SUNDISK 1 #...." would seem superfluous to me).

 

[Brian_tii]

You got it, that should work.

 

[compucare]

Actually I tried another method before this one to solve my problem. I found on another forum here:
http://community.intuit.com/posts/hamachi-vpn
that some success had been achieved by changing the binding order of network adapters. That is what worked for me. (Although, it seems to me that your method of modifying the hosts file might achieve the same ends).

 

[Israelo]

We are using QuickBooks hosted on cloud. We are having our company’s branch offices round the world, and there has been no problems regarding communicating remotely with our QuickBooks from any of our braches. QuickBooks as a hosted software offers a much better, quicker, more secure, more reliable, and more effective solution than the locally installed version of this software. QuickBooks hosting provides ability to work from anywhere and at anytime, provides cost efficiency, simultaneous access for multiple users, full backup, and 24/7 support free of cost. QuickBooks hosting leads to less IT related expenditure, as the QuickBooks software is installed on host’s server and not on your computer system or local server. Hosted QuickBooks run on a cloud server, and thus, does not use your system resources.

Hi Hall,

I wish to do same here in my company, i can access qucikbooks data file from remotely and work in multi-users environ, but how can i print from Quickbooks to my Local LAN.


Regards,

Israel

 

[felicitajohnson]

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