SonicWall VPN - slow connection issues

[mucous]

Hello,

My office is in a Win2k environment with a SonicWall Pro230 firewall and VPN. Until today, our two remote users were able to connect without issue. Access to Outlook and file shares appeared to be ok, however today, their connections seem painfully slow. Our office uses a DSL connection through Covad. The Home user is connected to the Internet via Comcast. I can see from pings and traces that the Covad connection looks good. We are experiencing no trouble either. The home users DO connect through the VPN and pull IP addresses from our Win2k DHCP server. I've tried adjusting the firewall MTU per SonicWalls recommendation and been in touch with our Internet provider, Covad and they assure me there aren't issues on their end. I've repeatedly gone through the VPN client configs with nothing looking out of the ordinary, and asked the home users to contact Comcast to see if there were any network issues on their end. Comcast says all is well on their side, so now, I am running out of ideas. Originally, the MTU on our firewall was set to 1500, after speaking with SonicWall, I changed it to 1404, then 1460, and am now back to 1500 as it did appear to affect our office Internet connection some without improving the VPN users connection. The home users both use a linksys BEFSR41 4 port DSL/Cable router on their home networks. I have not been able to access the configs on either home router, however they've been connecting for approx. the last three or so weeks without trouble until today, so I am assuming the home routers are not part of the trouble. We did run speed tests at DSLReports.com from the remote users computers and 2 out of 3 tests showed slow speeds on Comcast's side. This was done before contacting Comcast. They also ran tests and I'm looking at the results showing no problems on their end. I could use some help or suggestions to determine why this is happening. I personally suspect it to be their Comcast line, however after seeing the test results sent to me, I can't say so for sure. Any thoughts or ideas are greatly appreciated!

 

[mucous]

I've been in touch with SonicWall support and according to them, all is well as far as the VPN tunnel. It appears the trouble is with our win2k servers. We have one file server that's set up for remote access and hands out DHCP addresses to our VPN clients. They are getting the IP addresses, but bogging down when trying to get to mapped drives or Open Outlook. This only began happening over this past week. I'm hoping for any helpful suggestions as to what may be the cause of this. I'm also seeing trouble with OWA. Both VPN and OWAS are allowing logons, but behaving very slowly if at all from that point on. OWAS just syas "loading" once in. VPN users trying to go to Outlook get a message saying the server is not available when they open outlook. Regular office staff seem to be experiencing no issues.