[vpn-help] Recurrent Dropped Connections

[Kevin VPN]

On 09/19/2013 06:15 AM, Jason Pepper wrote:
>
> I run OSX and Ubuntu as my primary operating systems but we install Win7
> for our users.
>
> Shrew on OSX and Ubuntu has worked flawlessly since I installed it, it
> never drops.. period.
>
> On Windows 7, however, I am receiving a flurry of complaints from users who
> report (in different ways) that the connection is dying and the only way
> they can seem to resurrect the connection is to reboot the computer. This
> is (obviously) not acceptable. We have tried to isolate a set of
> circumstances which cause this problem to reproduce at will but alas we
> were unsuccessful.
>

Hi Jason,

Are there other symptoms associated with the dropped tunnel?  Like for 
instance the apps or OS seem to lock up?  Are your users accessing 
network drives?  Are they wired or wireless?

I discovered a problem with one user a little while ago.  Her VPN would 
disconnect/drop randomly, but not longer than 50 minutes after 
connection.  This drop would cause the system I/O to lock up pretty 
hard, and you'd have to shutdown or reboot before it was functional 
again.  She has the Novell client installed, uses a gorgeous ultrabook 
running Win7 (Pro I believe), and the problem only occurs when using 
wireless.

Using ProcessExplorer, I'd find a thread using 100% of a CPU core. 
ProcessExplorer identified it as "ntoskrnl.exe 
KeReleaseInStackQueuedSpinLock+0x1e0"

I wasn't ever able to figure out what was causing it, but I'd be curious 
if your users are experiencing the same thing.