Sam needed to get onto his office PC (AL0082-SAGUIAR) from his Mac. Prior Notion reconstruction work from April 4, 2026 had documented the VPN and RDP setup but the stored password was a guess, not verified. The session goal was to find the working connection information, troubleshoot issues, actually get Sam logged in, and then preserve the working protocol plus correct credentials.
The goal evolved mid-session. After the connection succeeded, the VPN dropped and reconnected. RDP stopped working. That shifted the session into a secondary diagnosis of why the L2TP/IPsec tunnel is unstable, with Starlink CGNAT as the leading suspect.
Pulled the VPN and RDP details from:
Confirmed the setup uses a direct RDP connection over the Meraki Client VPN. No RD Gateway is used. The wife's Windows laptop is the known-good reference configuration.
VPN was connecting cleanly but RDP to 192.168.8.160 was failing. Sam's VPN-assigned IP was 192.168.9.245. The office LAN is 192.168.8.0/24. Without "Send all traffic over VPN connection" enabled on the Mac, macOS was not routing 192.168.8.x through the ppp0 tunnel, so the RDP packets were going out the default interface and never reaching the office.
Fix: enabled "Send all traffic over VPN connection" in System Settings, Network, VPN, Options. Reconnected the VPN. Ping to 192.168.8.160 succeeded. RDP connected. Sam confirmed he was in with "good stuff".
Notion previously listed EvanOwen11!!! or EvanOwen!!!! as guesses. Sam clarified the correct password is EvanOwen11!! with two exclamation marks. Updated three entries in the A - Passwords page (dc6e22b8-4666-4fa0-a9c5-e3c5fe4d6c1f):
New page: Office PC Remote Desktop + VPN Protocol (VERIFIED WORKING 2026-04-17)