I telecommute four days a week and need to get to various servers at work over a VPN connection. I don't like routing all my traffic through the VPN connection, because I do a lot of internet work as part of my job. I don't want to pull all that through the company connection and down a VPN pipe, so I have my VPN connection set to only route traffic through the VPN that goes to my company's resources.
The problem is this: when I am on site, I can browse the various Windows workgroups and shares without a problem and connect easily (thank you, Leopard!). But when I VPN in, I lose this ability. I can access shares by typing in their IP addresses, and this works fine for those servers that have static IPs. However, some of the servers (developer boxes, etc.) will have IPs that roll over every week, making this method impossible.
This has been a major annoyance of mine for quite some time, and I have looked extensively for some way to make it work, but haven't been able to discover anything. Then, one day, on a whim, I decided to do a traceroute on the IP address of one of the servers over the VPN connection. In the output, I saw "mycompany.com" appended to one of the jumps in the route. The thought then struck me, "what if I connected using smb://server.mycompany.com?" It worked beautifully. My life is now complete.
I suspect that the network wise among you will say something like "well, duh," but the fact is, I searched OS X hints and every other place I could think of for a simple tip like this and couldn't find it anywhere. So I thought this might be useful to someone else as well. Enjoy!
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20080307092123215