Our domain controller (SBS 2003) completely lost internet and network connectivity yesterday after I remotely installed LogMeIn Hamachi on it and set it to be a gateway node- in an attempt to create a VPN link between the server and a remote site.

I had to go in to the office to resolve the problem as, unsurprisingly, my own remote access to the server was also lost.

I was only able to restore network connectivity by deleting a virtual network adapter Hamachi created when making the server the gateway node (called "Hamachi bridge" I believe), then rebooting the server.

This is a repeatable problem. Every time I try to get this to work, it just takes the server offline. Why would this bridge affect regular TCP/IP connectivity on the NIC in this way?

I have tried a "hub-and-spoke" configuration between the server and our PC at a remote site (server set as hub, remote site as spoke). This caused no such problems with general internet connectivity, and file transfer worked well between the two computers. However, there was a DNS issue with the VPN between the two sites- resulting in Active Directory not being able to communicate between them (could not log on using domain user accounts at remote site if they were not already cached on that machine).

I only tried a "gateway" network as LogMeIn support told me:

If you can get the Active Directory to work it would only be through a "Gateway" network type with the server acting as the Gateway Node. You would configure the gateway settings on the server in the Hamachi client on that machine to push whatever IP's/DNS settings you prefer and at that point AD would be able (all things being equal) communicate to the client node when it attaches. We do not have any ActiveDirectory configuration info as that's outside the scope of our support. I hope this helps.

It would be fantastic if I could get Active Directory to work over a Hamachi VPN connection, without worrying about the server going offline in this way.

Does anyone have any ideas how I should proceed, or any theories as to what is going on when I try to use the "gateway" network type? I want to try to narrow down what is going on here.