Plusnet: Stop blocking my incoming VPN connection.
FIXEDMiracle happens..
On phone to PN tech.. nothing to do with them he says... but try factory reset.
Does factory reset.. nothing. He puts me on hold.. it starts working.. both RDP and VPN using L2TP.
Gets off the phone, guess what? It all STOPS WORKING AGAIN.
Incidentally considering it's a factory reset, it's funny how there's still over 200 pages in the log file.
HOW VERY STRANGE. Interact with Plusnet and it starts working, then stops the moment I'm off the phone.
Yoiur Hub2 does however have a bug that I've noticed. My PC has a wifi and Ethernet adapter. These are bridged using the windows software network bridge - IP address is 192.168.1.2
Windows7 incoming VPN is set to use IP addresses randing from 198.168.1.210 <> 192.168.1.215
The router keeps picking up my PC between those ranges:
I doubt that's the actual cause though, it's been doing that for years - unless you've pushed an update that you've not told anyone about.
It would however sort of make sense if the router is now trying to push traffic there instead of to 192.168.1.2 - for remote desktop that's a killer as forwarding packets to 192.168.1.2 is how it should work.., no idea about VPN using L2TP.
Never heard of a factory reset leaving 200 pages of log files... that's amazing.
That was literally while I was on the phone to your man at Plusnet HQ.
Since then, NOTHING. No RDP, no VPN. Heck I don't think VNC will work either.
Right, your router IS at fault with a BUG that you have never discovered or corrected.
This:
Selecting the Device Name does not work - the router has (mysteriously) picked up it's VPN IP addresses (probably based on the Mac address) and has decided that using the machine name will do - data can be sent to the new IP which is wrong and not used by Windows to accept raw traffic. Windows accepts VPN encrypted traffic here.
So, it allows the first connection because it's pointing to 192.168.1.2. Then the router see's teh 210-215 IP address and points to that. Now it won't allow any normal traffic in because it's pointing there and will do so for X amount of time. Eventually, it will forget that IP and reset back to 192.168.1.2 - and then it will allow another connection again - and then lock onto the next IP in the 10 - 15 IP range - and so the cycle repeats. This now explains why I was getting one connection and then being blocked.
Using the actual IP address WORKS. I do vaguely remember now having some issue with this moons ago.
So your router has a bug. I use windows VPN which offers it's own IP addresses to connecting clients and it expects encrypted traffic. There is no point associating these IP addresses with that MAC and attempting to forward unencrypted data here as it does nothing.
In the process, your tech support guy telling me to factory reset it, has now lost me all of the family devices MACs, IP addresses and 'names' that were associated with them. I can sort that another time but this is the sort of expert knowledge I would have expected from a technical support person who is supposed to sit there supporting YOUR ROUTER.
The logic to fix this in your firmware?
Discover device MAC and IP address - first sighting of it, capture and store. Once this mac address is seen with a different IP address, ping the old one. If it responds and still has the same MAC then DO NOT UPDATE IT. It's that simple (obviously in code it probably won't be but that's the general logic flow).
Hope this helps someone else..
