Windows VPN

[mwt03160]

I've recently been messing around with Windows VPN, just trying to gain more experienced and get a little more accustomed to it. The other day a friend and I were trying to create a tunnel from remote locations/separate networks. I'm pretty sure that I have the incoming connection configured correctly, but I've been running into some problems with the outgoing connection. Theoretically I should be using the Public IP Address of the remote/host router to create the tunnel. The remote router would be configured to port forward to the proper destination. With the proper credentials I should be able to establish the tunnel no problem. Unfortunately after a couple of hours we weren't successful and I figured I'd give it up for a bit and come back to it later. I'm wondering what we could possibly have been doing incorrectly? Could it be because we we're both on the same subnet – 192.168.1.1? Any ideas? Any insight is much appreciated. As I mentioned I only recently started working with VPN's. The other night in class we we're able to successfully create a PPTP – site-site tunnel using a router with DDWRT. We had specific instructions and it still took us at least an hour – hour and a half to configure the router and the workstations to create a tunnel.

Anyone know of a free VPN client that's easier to configure and set-up then Windows VPN? I've heard from a few different sources that Windows VPN can be difficult to set-up.