Virgin Media Community

[JPMac27]

In the past week I have no longer been able to access my work PC through my VPN connection.  I use Pulse Secure to access my work PC and it has been fine for many years.  Now it won't connect through my home wifi and my office have checked everything at their end and it is fine.  Does anyone know if any changes have been made to network settings or similar?  If I tether through my mobile mobile the connection is fine, so it know that it linked to my broadband connection.

[gary_dexter]

Your WAN IP could be blocked. Get your employer to check that. 

[JPMac27]

Yes, I've checked that with my employer and they aren't blocking it.  I noticed other forums having this issue with Hub 3 and Hub 5 but can't seem to see a solution being suggested.  I haven't been able to speak to an engineer at VirginMedia as there are none available.

[gary_dexter]

There’s not usually any issues with the Hub3 or 4 blocking VPN’s.

I exclusively used Pulse Secure with mine and it worked.

Have you tried temporarily setting to modem mode on your hub with your laptop connected by cable to see if it works?

[BaldrickBravo]

Your company VPN will be hosted on an endpoint, like `vpn.yourcompany.com`

Can find out what that end point is? You might be able to find out by looking at the VPN client on the computer - there might be someone you can right click on the client to open a settings dialog which shows you the endpoint.

Once you know what it is, you can could see if it will respond to ping. Open up a terminal and do:

ping vpn.yourcompany.com

If that works, that's a good sign. It probably means that your IP is not blocked. If that doesn't work, it could mean either that your IP is blocked, or the end point is configured to filter/drop ping requests.

Are there any other people who work for your employer using the same VPN? Are any of them using Virgin Media? I have seen problems where hundreds of people have been unable to connect to a specific VPN end point because of peering problems between Virgin Media and a company's point of presence. It wasn't actually Virgin Media's fault, it was an issue with a peering provider between VM and said point of presence.

[JPMac27]

Thanks @BalrdickBravo

I've attempted a ping request using the VirginMedia admin console and get the following:

4 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max = 0.000/0.000/0.000 ms

Used Terminal also and it keeps timing out also.

I've checked with other VirginMedia users at work and they aren't having any issues.  IT think it's just me for some reason.

[JPMac27]

Thanks @gary_dexter

Annoyingly I'll have to buy an ethernet to usb/lightning adaptor to connect to my MacBook to test it in modem mode.  Something for me to consider though by the look of things.

[BaldrickBravo]

Sounds odd that you would be the only VM person affected. It would be good to see the actual error and whether connection attempts are timing out.

Are you able to traceroute/tracert the VPN endpoint? That might yield some clues.
If you want to DM me the endpoint I can try and traceroute/MTR it from Virgin and my other ISP.

Clutching at straws really.

[gary_dexter]

Don’t give out your VPN endpoint details online - you’ll be breaching your company policy in doing so.

What is the error Pulse Secure gives you, if any?

[BaldrickBravo]

---

@gary_dexter wrote:

Don’t give out your VPN endpoint details online - you’ll be breaching your company policy in doing so.

---

Yeah but no. Really. It won't be.

The endpoint itself will already be in the public domain, by virtue of being a public DNS record and a public IP address. If disclosing it is breaching a company policy, that in itself would be beyond a joke and wouldn't stand any test of reasonableness at a tribuneral.

If I were asking for account details, copies of private keys or passwords, that would be a different matter.