[vpn-help] Recurrent Dropped Connections

[Jim Harle]

Hello Jason,

If you are looking for “enterprise class” support for the Shrew client, I don’t believe you are going to find it…this mailing list seems to be a user-to-user “best effort” in helping to sort out issues; I don’t recall seeing any posts from any Shrew Devs, unless I am ignorant and don’t know who they are.  My personal perspective is that IPSec VPNs are not always “straightforward,” and there is a lot that can go wrong, hence the migration to SSL VPNs many years ago – even Cisco is now end-of-lifing their IPSec clients.

My limited time on the list has shown me that people are willing to help each other when they can, but silence seems to mean nobody has a good grasp on how to address a particular issue.  I could be wrong, but I think we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for some Shrew Dev expertise to appear here.

Just my two cents.

-Jim

From: vpn-help-bounces at lists.shrew.net [mailto:vpn-help-bounces at lists.shrew.net] On Behalf Of Jason Pepper
Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2013 3:16 AM
To: vpn-help at lists.shrew.net
Subject: [vpn-help] Recurrent Dropped Connections

I support 55 users in our company with a mixed bag of VPN connectivity.

Since we started installing 64bit Win 7 we discovered there is no compatible CheckPoint client for 64bit Windows.

Enter Shrew the saviour.. or so I thought.

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.

I have trawled this forum and been subscribed for a while now, so I've seen that people are experiencing similar issues and there appear to be various suggestions for resolution (e.g. writing daemon-kill scripts) which seem a little home-brew for me. Plus, none of the error scenarios completely match the ones described by our users.

This is my first question on this forum so I don't want to illicit a flame-flurry.

What is the best way to ask for assistance in resolving this problem ?

I have a bunch of IKE trace files I can supply if that helps someone help me, but I didn't want to post them unbidden.

Also, please note I am primarily an Oracle and Java developer not a security expert, so speak in simple terms (if that's possible !)

--
Many Thanks..

Jason Pepper
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