[ILUG] Cisco VPN Client and NTL Broadband -- resolved

Éibhear eibhear at gibiris.org
Sun Feb 10 16:36:18 GMT 2008


Barry O'Donovan wrote:
> Pádraig is probably on the right track.
> 
> Can you send the output of the following three commands with and without the 
> VPN tunnel being initialised:
> 
> route -n
> ifconfig
> cat /etc/resolv.conf
> 
> What may also be useful is the output of a program called lft (Layer Four 
> Traceroute). If you could install it and run the following, again with and 
> without the VPN:
> 
> lft www.google.com
> 
> It would answer a lot of questions. LFT will try and traceroute using TCP port 
> 80.
> 
> Deoending on you system, you may need to be root for some of the above 
> commands.
> 
>  - Barry
> 
> 
> On Saturday 09 February 2008 01:06:58 Pádraig Brady wrote:
>> Éibhear wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> We have recently switched from Eircom Broadband to Chorus/NTL.
>>>
>>> The biggest problem is when my wife connects into her place of work.
>>> Whenever she attempts to access any web page, it never renders. What I
>>> can see is that the HTTP connections are timing out. But I don't know
>>> where to go from there.
>>>
>>> Perhaps someone on ILUG can offer some pointers on what I can do to
>>> figure out what's going on.
>>>
>>> The following is what I believe is relevant information:
>>> + Debian Etch
>>> + Cisco VPN Client 4.6.02
>>> + Scientific Atlanta cable modem
>>> + Firefox (though I see this behaviour with Konqueror and lynx)
>>> + Using telnet to the server and port and then using the HTTP
>>>   GET command for the specific URL works: the HTML source is
>>>   returned.
>>> + Other connection types seem to work fine (IMAP for e-mail,
>>>   telnet, ping, etc.)
>>>
>>> Can you suggest a few things or tools I could use that would help me out?
>> This only happens when the VPN client is initialised right?
>>
>> It's weird that only HTTP has an issue.
>> Perhaps there is a proxy setting somewhere?
>>
>> I'd guess that the VPN client sets the default route
>> out it's virtual interface. So you may want to (re)set
>> the default route out your actual ethernet device.
>> The VPN server though may not allow this however depending on settings.
>>
>> Take this with a pinch of salt as I know feck all about VPNs.
>>
>> Pádraig.
> 
> 
> 
Hi,

Before I got a chance to try any of the suggestions (accepted with
thanks, by the way), the problem resolved itself. I don't know what it
was, or what the resolution is for certain, but the only difference I
can observe is that the output of the "vpnclient" command is now
reporting 3 different IP addresses as gateways, and sometimes 4, when
before there were only ever 2. I now suspect that the new modem has
nothing to do with this, and that it was a server configuration issue.

Thanks for the responses, all the same.

Éibhear

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