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Mapped drives disconnecting over VPN tunnel

  • 06-08-2009 5:55pm
    #1
    eth0_
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 10,846 ✭✭✭✭


    The company I work for has a once a year need to open some satellite offices around the city for a period of 2 months. I am the only I.T. person in the company but we contract out the setup of these offices and connection back to head office.

    We have fibre connections from head office to the satellite sites, and VPN tunneling. Everything is fine except for connections to mapped drives (your common or garden Windows smb mapped drives) on our (XP) client machines in these satellite offices.

    The company who set it up are basically scratching their heads over it and not really taking the issue very seriously even though it is of vital importance to our users that they access these drives. Users tell me they are getting disconnections maybe 80-100 times a day, and using databases housed on network drives is impossible.

    I've been told SMB over VPN tunnels is a really dumb idea - why is this?
    Are there any workarounds?


Comments

  • #2
    Moriarty
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 6,007 ✭✭✭Moriarty


    Could be an issue with MTU over the vpn links forcing packets to be dropped once machines start sending large enough packets to matter. Any idea if this has been taken into account when the connections were configured?


  • #3
    eth0_
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 10,846 ✭✭✭✭eth0_


    Moriarty wrote: »
    Could be an issue with MTU over the vpn links forcing packets to be dropped once machines start sending large enough packets to matter. Any idea if this has been taken into account when the connections were configured?

    I'd like to think they've thought of lowering the MTU on the link...the guy who set it up is very unapproachable.

    What he has done as a "fix" is removing synchronisation from the PC's in the satellite office. I'm in one of the offices right now, waiting for the connection to the drive to drop as i'm sure this "fix" is total BS!


  • #4
    NullZer0
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,629 ✭✭✭NullZer0


    Dr TCP/IP :) FTW


  • #5
    johnmd
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 55 ✭✭johnmd


    MTU should be sorted out automatically on the firewalls,worth checking the logs as well i have seen issues with sites not able to browse various internet web sites due to MTU issues with certain older cisco routers.
    Also you might try connecting directly to the firewall from another location via VPN client or a home firewall to firewall vpn and see if you get the same issue.
    Plus stick and external ping monitor on both wan interfaces from an external source, nagios etc etc to see if you are in fact dropping intermittently.
    If you have fiber to the remote sites then why are you even bothering with Vpns,just stick switch on each site and put them on the same subnet,or do you mean you have a fibre pipe to the internet on each site?

    Smb over vpn will always be a pig,its not designed to function well over low bandwidth high latency links.Have you any control of the traffic actually travelling over the VPN
    What kind of bandwidth do you have between the sites?
    Is allow netbios over tcp/ip enabled on the vpn settings?


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