Slow VPN

[philote]

Maybe I'm expecting too much but our office has two locations connected by VPN that is extremely slow. One side has DSL, the other cable, both are using older Watchguard Fireboxes (Firewall/VPN). It takes for...ev...er to transfer files from one side to the other. Conneting through the VPN to the server with Terminal Services does good enough, but we really need to be able to transfer files faster.

I just noticed today that something a little strange. I can ping machines on the other side of the VPN fine. However, after reading something about this on another web site I tried specifying the "Send buffer size" (-l option for ping in windows) I reached a point where it would time out. It would work for anything up to 4634 bytes and after that it times out every time.

Oh, and this may be another clue... while sending these pings and writing this message we lost connectivity to the internet. I tried pinging our firewall/vpn box and didn't get a response. Maybe its getting a little flakey in its old age.

 

[philote]

Anyone have ideas on this??

Kevin
A+, Network+, MCP

 

[John Lewis]

Hard to tell without specifics.

What are your rated connection speeds on both ends. Specify both downstream and upstream.

How long does it take to transfer a large file? Provide a file size and a time.

How are you transferring the file? Drag-n-drop, copy command, ftp, etc?

 

[philote]

Thanks for replying.

I'll have to check with our ISP's to see what our connections are "supposed" to be.

I just tried transferring a ~1MB file and it took approx. 50 seconds. I'll do some more tests with different transfer methods. This one was done with a copy/paste using windows explorer and a shared folder.

Kevin
A+, Network+, MCP

 

[John Lewis]

1MB in 50 seconds = about 164kbs raw, with overhead would be about 175 - 185. Keep in mind that the upload speed on the side you are copying from is probably the bottleneck.

 

[philote]

Well I haven't asked our ISP what our connection is supposed to be but 164kb/s sounds pretty average. It also seems that this problem is better now... we had major connection problems last week and our ISP sent out a technician to fix some cabling problems. I suspect those problems existed before and only got worse recently and were the cause of our vpn slowness.

Kevin
A+, Network+, MCP