VPN hangs with remote desktop

[vifa84]

I am trying to connect to my office through a VPN. I can connect but for some reason, when using remote desktop it seems to hang intermittently. I start the VPN and it connects, I then enter my office ip in RDP and it connects. My office desktop comes up and I can work for 30 seconds or so. Then it hangs for 15 to 45 seconds, sometimes the network icon comes up in the upper right hand corner and then it seems to reconnect and work again for 30 seconds or so and over and over again. I can't use pcanywhere at all. It connects and then just hangs right away. I'm thinking it might have something to do with the way they have their firewall set up in freebsd.. Does anyone have any suggestions. I've tried connecting my home computer straight to the dsl modem, same thing. What's weird is I can connect from my office computer to home through remote desktop with no hanging at all, runs perfect. Of course, it's not running through the vpn. I don't need a vpn for outbound, just inbound to the office.

It seems like as long as you keep the curser moving when connected through the vpn and their is activity, it stays connected. For example: if i open a word document when I connect and keep scrolling through the document it stays connected. but if i stop for a few seconds and the activity light on the modem stops, it hangs for up to a minute or more.

 

[AUSIPO]

I honstly would be looking at the other end (Office).. It seems that the Free BSD have some sort of a idle drop out setting set to a few seconds.. i haven't had alot to do with FreeBSD. but if you can connect to home than that what would be.

 

[vifa84]

Just to follow up. I fixed it by disabling the winxp firewall on the client side and just using the firewall on the router.

Now I just wish I could get my fedora core 3 laptop working. I can connect up and it says it's running and I can ping my office computer. However, as soon as I try to connect up to rdp through the terminal it just brings up a black screen and then if I try to ping it says network unreachable. To fix it i have to stop the internet connection and restart it.

 

[g8orade]

You could try a netstat -a and see which ports your xp machine is trying to open. I have seen this on cisco clients. Also its possible that fragmentation of packets is causing the issue. See microsoft trouble shooting black-hole router issues for insturctions.

 

[technome]

As G8orade stated , look for fragments or lost packets.

Use the Pathping command ( pathping xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx ) from the remotes to the office, if you have no line problems, you should have few ,if any lost packets. The ping command is basically useless, as most router will let it through, but drop other packets. Each remote may be running thru different routers , you should pathping from multiple remotes.

Search for "Tcp Optimizer" on google and run it for the MTU test.

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