Company VPN issue

[skyrine]

I will preface with the acknowlegement that our works VPN is not supported by Virgin Media but we are desperate for some guidance as this could mean she can no longer work from home.

2 weeks ago my wife's work laptop stopped connecting to her work's VPN from home.
This had been working for the past 3 years.
She can connect over our network to everything else she has tried, general browsing, streaming platforms and even some of her works 'internet facing' web services.

My wife CAN connect to her VPN when connected to other wifi providers, her colleague's SKY wifi for example, and her mobile phone in hotspot mode (She is with 3) and my phone over hotspot mode ( I'm with EE ).

My wife's laptop has been rebuilt by her ICT team and it behaves the same as before, i.e. browses and connects to everything other than her works VPN.
Her ICT team claim to not be aware of VPN issues, but I take that with a pinch of salt.
Because it is a very locked down VPN package we cannot see any error message other than the unhelpful and generic 'failed to establish a connection'.

We have made a couple of calls to the help desk but got different comments each time.
The last-but-one call we had a chap who stated he had seen a few VPN issues recently that needded a config change at his end that would then require us doing a pin hole reset to pick up the new config, with a promise to call us back once the config change was done to walk my wife through the pin hole reset.
When the call did not happen we called again to be told there is no issue at VM end and no notes on her account from the previous chap...Typical of our experience with VM support via phone...

We have a 200MB Cable modem in modem mode connected to a Google mesh puck.
We have made no changes to our home network in a very long time.
I can still connect to my (different) works VPN.

I've tried the basic stuff I'm familiar with, ipconfig/fushdns, changing DNS servers on the google mesh to Google's, OpenDNS, and back to 'default' to pick up VM's dns.
Can anyone give us any help/guidance?

[legacy1]

Try the laptop to the hub in modem mode

[pete_at_home]

1. What type of VPN is it ?
2. Do you get DNS replies if you try the VPN domain name in a command window ?

[Client62]

Configure the work laptop to use Google Public DNS ( 8.8.8.8 & 8.8.4.4 ) & try the office VPN again.

[skyrine]

My arthritic fingerr double clicked the 'reply' button so this got marked as 'helpful', ho hum.

Any way.I tried it cat5 directly to the hub in modem mode. Unfortunately the machine is heavily locked down by ICT so I cant alter the ethernet connection to use 192.168.100.1 as a gateway so nothing at all worked.

[skyrine]

It is using the windows built in VPN option so all I can see is the internet facing URL for the connection which is just the works domain prefixed with vpn as a subdomain. I cant see any congif options as it is locked down by ICT requiring and admin login.

I did a pathping to the subdoamin it points to and the redacted output is :

Tracing route to vpn.[redacted domain name].gov.uk [redacted IP of vpn endpoint]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
0 XXX30474.[redacted AD domain].Gov [192.168.0.22]
1 192.168.0.1
2 10.53.36.181
3 cdif-core-2a-ae52-650.network.virginmedia.net [62.254.255.133]
4 * * *
Computing statistics for 75 seconds...
Source to Here This Node/Link
Hop RTT Lost/Sent = Pct Lost/Sent = Pct Address
0 XXX30474.[redacted AD domain].Gov [192.168.0.22]
100/ 100 =100% |
1 --- 100/ 100 =100% 0/ 100 = 0% 192.168.0.1
0/ 100 = 0% |
2 --- 100/ 100 =100% 0/ 100 = 0% 10.53.36.181
0/ 100 = 0% |
3 --- 100/ 100 =100% 0/ 100 = 0% cdif-core-2a-ae52-650.network.virginmedia.net [62.254.255.133]

Trace complete.

To my novice eyes, this looks to hit the VM core in cardiff and simply stop, dead.

[skyrine]

Sadly all network related config options are locked down by ICT. I have set the google mesh puck to use google's dns but it made no difference. Not sure if it could/would but thought it worth testing.

[skyrine]

How do I revert the 'solved' tag? Im an old fart that mis-clicked !!!

[legacy1]

Use router mode

[Zach_R]

Hi @skyrine, 

Thank you for your posts and welcome back to our community forums. We're here to help.

I'm so sorry to hear that your wife is having some problems with her work VPN when connected to one of our routers. Have the steps advised by the community in the comments above helped at all so far?

Thanks,