vpn connection drops

yanqui

We have a user who comes in one week a month to work from our location. The rest of the time she works from her home many, many miles away. From home, she connects through her DSL to our VPN, and it works flawlessly. At our location she connects wirelessly to our network internally, but at her hotel room, she uses an air card to connect to the VPN. She can connect, but as soon as she opens a file in her folder on the server, the connection drops. Any idea why? We've suggested that she disable her wireless while she's using an air card, but she hasn't tried that. Would that indeed cause the connection to drop, if the hotel is providing wireless internet service?

sthomas

Does the user get a good signal in the hotel room? Is the hotel in a small town? It has been awhile since I have used those but I remember having issues in some areas where the signal quality was not good enough to work with the cards correctly.

Dannybear

VPN needs a certain amount of bandwith to connect - if she has poor signal then the card will not work.

Unless the hotel lock down their internet connection and dont allow VPN's out i would advise using their connection rather than the card. I've had nothing but problems with them before unless you are in a big city.

sprkymrk

I am with the others, use the hotel wireless, and yes, disable the aircard while you are using the wireless. I have had issues with something similar.

Do your VPN error logs report anything? I have seen stuff like "packet dropped because it should have gone into tunnel but didn't".

yanqui

Really good signal from the AT&T air card; mid-size metro city; smaller than Atlanta, but still good sized, it's Mobile AL (there really is such a place.) I'll look at the logs next time she's in town, I know she's going to have troubles again. She also has trouble getting her printers to work with our firewall settings. She's a lawyer, not a techie.

Kasor

I recommend to look at the log first. Just a remind that sometime is the local LAN switch/router that disable VPN connection because of the limited space allocation by their ISP.

There are many way that you will not get a VPN connection.

JDMurray

Does the hotel have DSL in the rooms or is it wireless Internet access only? If there is in-room DSL, have her connect using the Ethernet port on the laptop instead of the wireless. Also have her use a hardware firewall between the DSL modem and her laptop for security.