[vpn-help] Shrewsoft Client Issues

[Liam]

Hi all,
I just thought I would let everyone know that the issue turned out to be 
the Netgear router, not Shrewsoft.

It seems there is a bug with the router firmware where if you statically 
assign IP's to clients (on the router side) and change the LAN IP Range, 
even if you then adjust the static assignments for your clients to match 
the new range the routing table or whatever gets messed up. This occurs 
even if you delete the static assignments for the old IP range and 
recreate them on the new IP range. I am not convinced the latest 
firmware is particularly stable as I have had other issues with it as 
well. Anyway, I reset the router to factory defaults, set up the VPN 
again and the VPN worked fine with ShrewSoft.

Thanks Alexis for replying to my email. Much appreciated!

Regards,

Liam



On 15/07/2012 11:06 AM, Liam wrote:
> Hi,
> I am experiencing connection dropout problems using the Shrewsoft VPN 
> client (both 2.1.7 and 2.2.0 Beta 2) in Windows (both XP and 7) with a 
> new Netgear ProSafe FVS318N (latest firmware) which I am setting up 
> for remote users to VPN into.
>
> I have followed and repeated your Netgear How To instructions to the 
> letter (http://www.shrew.net/support/wiki/HowtoNetgear) to set up an 
> IPSEC VPN and the initial connection works fine but when I connect to 
> a network drive and start transferring files or use Windows remote 
> desktop (RDP), those connections appear to work well initially but 
> drop out every 60-80 seconds every time for around 20 seconds.
>
> The VPN remains up as I can continue pinging resources through the VPN 
> the whole time and there are no VPN error messages that I can see. The 
> Network tab of VPN Connection shows 1 for Established and 0 for both 
> Expired and Failed. The only errors I see are from the Windows pc 
> connecting to the VPN stating "The connection has been lost. 
> Attempting to reconnect to your session..." for the RDP dropout and a 
> "The network resource was not found" for the dropped connection to the 
> network drive.
>
> I tried connecting two different computers (both stable and in good 
> working order) using XP and 7 to the VPN and RDP and network drive 
> drop outs occur. I have tried using two different Cat5 cables with 
> both an indirect connection (using another router) and a direct 
> connection to the WAN port of the Netgear VPN router (using static 
> IP's etc). I also tried disabling Dead Peer Detection on both the 
> router and the VPN clients and it made no difference. If I connect on 
> the LAN side of the router using those cables and computers, there are 
> no issues using RDP or network drives.
>
> Also, when Version 2.2.0 Beta is installed, it prompts users to update 
> to version 2.1.7. This is not ideal given that the reason some users 
> may be using this version in the first place is due to the Dead Peer 
> Detection issue with some Netgear routers. I would suggest that update 
> checks should only seek higher numbers, ie 2.2.0 to 2.2.1 etc, unless 
> of course a Beta version was completely revoked.
>
> Anyway, if anyone has any advice I would really appreciate it as I am 
> not sure where to go from here.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Liam