macalchemist
MIS
I have a client that has an office which does consulting for a company out of Nashville. All of the consultants use the vpn Cisco client to get to the host router, and then enter data to an AS/400 back end.
When this particular client was using static IPs for each computer and was directly plugged into the cable modem (which has 4 data ports), all the connections seemed fine.
This person wants to get rid of the block of static IPs so he can save some money.
At that time, he was using a small Linksys router (I think it was a BEFSR41), and two computers couldn't seem to log into the vpn host at one time, apparently the host just wouldn't allow more than one connection from the same IP address - or it had to do something with the router.
I talked to the guys in the Nashville office and asked if it would be OK to open up a vpn branch tunnel connection from our router to theirs. They said (at the time) that it would be OK, so my client purchased a Linksys RV082 vpn router.
Then the higher ups got involved, and since they have no control over their consultant's offices, they nixed the vpn tunnel connection. They wanted me to try to connect again to the vpn host, making sure I was using the newest Cisco client (which at the time was a fairly new version of 4.02 on the Win side and whatever the last version was on the Mac side before the one came out in May).
With the RV082 router, the same machines that were having trouble connecting before now were connecting fine.
The only caveat is that they're timing out or getting booted off after an indiscriminate amount of time - sometimes it's two minutes, sometimes it's 20 minutes, and sometimes it's when the machine is idle, and sometimes it's when they're entering data.
The guys in Nashville don't know what's going on.
Could this be my router that is causing this? At least this one seems to allow multiple clients to connect to the same end point whereas the other one couldn't. I also need to "downgrade" his router, because he doesn't want the more expensive router if he's not going to use the vpn functionality - but I think I at least need something that handles IPsec well (suggestions?)
Is there another router that might handle this better?
On the Win side I've upgraded them to SP2 on their XP machines, and the 1 mac that is online is running 10.3.9.
All machines are displaying the same behavior (except one seems to do it less than the others, but it still happens).
Thanks
Erik