VPN getting drop frequently

[jcck2003]

Hi All:

our company is located at the East coast, we have about 5-7 user using VPN (either Microsoft VPN in an NT server box or Cisco VPN concentrator), one user is based out in San Franscisco, while others is more closer to us.

the user in CA constantly experiencing connection drops, sometimes as frequent as every hours, sometimes he would connnect 3-4 hours and still connected. he is working mostly in Outlook/Exchange, and had a huge amount of data in his Outlook/Exchange folders, I have him cleaned out about half of it (around 500MB), he got dropped a little less frequently but the issue still occur

I begin to wonder if this issue has something to do with his cable connection, is there any utility or test out there we can check to see weather he has a good connection suits the VPN environment ? he seems to connect to the Internet fine when he surfs

Thank you
JDK

 

[klutzman]

Hi,

My first question is this....is there a timeout on the vpn connection. I support vpn clients from all over the world and most vpn connections have inactivity timeouts that vary from 5 min to 23 hrs. The first thing I would check would be to make sure that outlook is checking for new mail every 10 min or so. That way any inactivity timeouts would be reset when Outlook checks for mail.

Who is the ISP? One issue we have seen is the lease times for the IP address of the computer. If the ip address changes every hour, then it could drop the connection. It might not hurt to put a linksys between the computer and modem (if you are using a cable or dsl connection).

Also, Make sure any keep alive options are disabled. This option sends a special packet accross the network that I have seen cause a vpn connection to fail.

I hope this helps,

klutzman