When I am at work and connected to our network, i can hit command-K and then enter the path:
smb://xxserver/xfiles. Everything connects as expected and I can browse files on our company network.
Here’s my prob:
When I’m at home, I can connect to the VPN (PPTP) at the office, without issue. But i get the following message when requesting the same path from home: “There was a problem connecting to the server “Xserver”. The server may not exist or is unavailable at this time. Check the server name or IP address, check you network connection, and then try again."
Unfortunately it could be due to any number of things, so you’d be better off asking your IT department, as they know how the network is set up. It could be as simple as connecting via the fully-qualified domain name (xxserver.example.com), if you know what that is. It might also be that the VPN is intentionally not allowing access to the smb server.
If your VPN connection does not set up a DNS server pointing to the internal network DNS, xxserver will not resolve to an IP address and you cannot connect.
There may be a suffix you can use to help resolve the name. Many modern Windows-based networks designate the their internal servers and stations as yyy.local. For instance, if you work for Bob’s Pizza, the server may be accessible as xxserver.bobspizza.local . With the VPN connection established, your files would be at smb://xxserver.bobspizza.local/xfiles .
Or, of course, you could find out the server’s IP address and just use smb://10.10.4.42/xfiles.