Remote Users being dropped

PayolaSD

Junior Member
Apr 27, 2005
11
0
0
Hi,

I have remote users who VPN into our network. Lately they've been complaining that they are getting dropped repeatedly throughout the day. Usually, I've been noticing that our internet connection is temporarliy down (a few minutes at a time) when they are reporting their dropped connection. Obviously, it is related. My question is, what could be causing this? Is it possible that our bandwidth is spiking and being overwhelmed cutting off the line for short periods of time, thus dropping my remote users and the internet connection? Does that sound feasible? Sorry, I'm a relative noob to networking.

Also Do you guys know of any good bandwidth monitoring tools I can use to determine the problem? There are some limited reporting tools built into my firewall but are mostly worthless as far as I can tell.
 

spidey07

No Lifer
Aug 4, 2000
65,469
5
76
what kind of connection is it?

Two most likely causes are sever overutilization (but this shouldn't really disconnect VPN users unless it is really bad) and line trouble/error.

I'd call your provider.
 

PayolaSD

Junior Member
Apr 27, 2005
11
0
0
T1 line. I have called my provider and they tell me they cant find any significant errors on the line unfortunately.
 

spidey07

No Lifer
Aug 4, 2000
65,469
5
76
Originally posted by: PayolaSD
T1 line. I have called my provider and they tell me they cant find any significant errors on the line unfortunately.

That's whay they always say. Have them do some intrusive tests (service will be down during this time)

If you have a router you can check the error counters. There should be none or no more than 0.1% of total packets.

mrtg is a good freeware monitoring tool.
 

nweaver

Diamond Member
Jan 21, 2001
6,813
1
0
second MRTG. Set it up to run on your edge router, setup a script to monitor/log when your internet drops and compare them to find out what's going on. Also (even before the tests) I would check your router config/interface stats to make sure there isn't an issue that you can see there.