Mysterious behaviour on a VPN net

Some months ago the university I work for decreed that all PCs should be 
centrally administered (i.e. no installation of programs by the user, 
plus many other disadvantages). Only these PCs were permitted to stay on 
our original network. All users who would not or could not (e.g. eCS 
users) accept the change were transferred to a VPN network. For my own 
part the transfer was painless, apart from the VPN net being notably 
slower. All this changed three weeks ago. I logged off as normal on 
Friday, but when I returned to my office the following Monday and opened 
my browser to log on to the VPN net I received the message “Server not 
found” and thus failed to log on. The same thing happened the next day, 
however on the day after that I was able to log on as if nothing had 
been amiss and had network contact until the end of the week. The 
following Monday the cycle was repeated, “server not found” until 
Wednesday, after that uninterrupted network contact. This week, though, 
I've not been able to log on at all.

Our VPN administrator has tried to help, but has no  experience of eCS, 
so all he's been able to do is assure me that no changes have been made 
to the VPN server for several months. The same goes for my PC; I've made 
no changes to my network setup since the original transfer. There is 
also no hardware problem, I can log onto the VPN net from both “pure” XP 
and XP running under Virtual PC.

Does anyone have any idea what may be going on? How can my ability to 
log on to the VPN net change from day to day? And most importantly, does 
anyone have any suggestions as to how the problem might be fixed?

Hi Michael

Michael wrote:
> Some months ago the university I work for decreed that all PCs should be 
> centrally administered (i.e. no installation of programs by the user, 
> plus many other disadvantages). Only these PCs were permitted to stay on 
> our original network. All users who would not or could not (e.g. eCS 
> users) accept the change were transferred to a VPN network. For my own 
> part the transfer was painless, apart from the VPN net being notably 
> slower. All this changed three weeks ago. I logged off as normal on 
> Friday, but when I returned to my office the following Monday and opened 
> my browser to log on to the VPN net I received the message “Server not 
> found” and thus failed to log on. The same thing happened the next day, 
> however on the day after that I was able to log on as if nothing had 
> been amiss and had network contact until the end of the week. The 
> following Monday the cycle was repeated, “server not found” until 
> Wednesday, after that uninterrupted network contact. This week, though, 
> I've not been able to log on at all.
> 


The “Server not found” message is suggestive of a network connectivity 
problem...


Can you ping the Server when you get the “Server not found” message?

If "Yes" there would seem to be something going wrong with the logon 
process.

If "No" there is a network connectivity problem.



> Our VPN administrator has tried to help, but has no  experience of eCS, 
> so all he's been able to do is assure me that no changes have been made 
> to the VPN server for several months.



That sounds like the sort of noise my ISP makes when they have just 
changed lots of hardware and screwed a few things up in the process...  :-)


Regards

Pete



  The same goes for my PC; I've made
> no changes to my network setup since the original transfer. There is 
> also no hardware problem, I can log onto the VPN net from both “pure” XP 
> and XP running under Virtual PC.
>
> Does anyone have any idea what may be going on? How can my ability to 
> log on to the VPN net change from day to day? And most importantly, does 
> anyone have any suggestions as to how the problem might be fixed?
> 

Hi Peter,
Have been out of town for a few days so didn't have chance to continue 
for a solution until today. Fired up my PC this morning with some hope 
that it would log on normally. Alas, no, so the situation looks as if it 
may be permanent.

Peter Brown wrote:
> Hi Michael
> 
> Michael wrote:
>> Some months ago the university I work for decreed that all PCs should 
>> be centrally administered (i.e. no installation of programs by the 
>> user, plus many other disadvantages). Only these PCs were permitted to

>> stay on our original network. All users who would not or could not 
>> (e.g. eCS users) accept the change were transferred to a VPN network. 
>> For my own part the transfer was painless, apart from the VPN net 
>> being notably slower. All this changed three weeks ago. I logged off 
>> as normal on Friday, but when I returned to my office the following 
>> Monday and opened my browser to log on to the VPN net I received the 
>> message “Server not found” and thus failed to log on. The same thing 
>> happened the next day, however on the day after that I was able to log

>> on as if nothing had been amiss and had network contact until the end 
>> of the week. The following Monday the cycle was repeated, “server not 
>> found” until Wednesday, after that uninterrupted network contact. This

>> week, though, I've not been able to log on at all.
>>
> 
> 
> The “Server not found” message is suggestive of a network connectivity 
> problem...
> 
> 
> Can you ping the Server when you get the “Server not found” message?
> 
> If "Yes" there would seem to be something going wrong with the
logon 
> process.
> 
> If "No" there is a network connectivity problem.

I can't ping anything from eCS, while VPC running under the same can 
ping everything. This being the case I thought I'd try updating the 
driver for my Intel Gigabit network card. Downloaded a newer driver from 
Intel's website than the installed driver but that didn't work at all - 
error messages during boot-up telling me that some drivers failed to 
load. Alas in installing the new driver package, it removed the previous 
network card driver (Intel 8254x) so I'm now going to have to try Chuck 
McKinnis's nicpak and if that fails, the Genmac package. I'm also going 
to install eCS beta4 on a vacant partition. This has worked flawlessly 
on my home PC so I have some hope that it might provide the cure.

Regards,

Michael
> 
> 
> 
>> Our VPN administrator has tried to help, but has no  experience of 
>> eCS, so all he's been able to do is assure me that no changes have 
>> been made to the VPN server for several months.
> 
> 
> 
> That sounds like the sort of noise my ISP makes when they have just 
> changed lots of hardware and screwed a few things up in the process... 
:-)
> 
> 
> Regards
> 
> Pete
> 
> 
> 
>  The same goes for my PC; I've made
>> no changes to my network setup since the original transfer. There is 
>> also no hardware problem, I can log onto the VPN net from both “pure” 
>> XP and XP running under Virtual PC.
>>
>> Does anyone have any idea what may be going on? How can my ability to 
>> log on to the VPN net change from day to day? And most importantly, 
>> does anyone have any suggestions as to how the problem might be fixed?
>>

On Fri, 2 May 2008 19:07:04 UTC, Michael <michael.talbot@geo.uib.no> 
wrote:

> I can log onto the VPN net from both pure XP 
> and XP running under Virtual PC.
> 

What do you get back from "ifconfig lan0"?
When you log onto VPN net, can you change your browser's user agent to
be some XP browser?
-- 
Expert Consulting for OS/2 and eComStation

Hi Neil,

Neil Waldhauer wrote:
> On Fri, 2 May 2008 19:07:04 UTC, Michael <michael.talbot@geo.uib.no>

> wrote:
> 
>> I can log onto the VPN net from both pure XP 
>> and XP running under Virtual PC.
>>
> 
> What do you get back from "ifconfig lan0"?
Here's what ifconfig has to say:

lan0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,LOOPBRD>
	inet o.o.o.o  netmask 0xffffffff

Means nothing to me, I'm afraid, but words like "UP" and
"RUNNING" 
suggest that there is nothing wrong with the NIC configuration.

> When you log onto VPN net, can you change your browser's user agent to
> be some XP browser?
Sadly no. I had also hoped a solution of this sort might work, but under 
present circumstances, with eCS unable to get a logon window, VPC can 
only access the net via the "Virtual Switch" option which seems to run

completely independent of eCS networking.

Regards,