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..
@bobpullen Well, i do have a habit of walking into things others haven't noticed..
Right, so this is the adapters I have in use (you'll also see some VMWare network adapters - they do their own thing which the network bridge seems to ignore):
Wireless Connection 4 can also be ignored - the PC doesn't seem to have realised that particular dongle isn't plugged in.
Network Bridge TCP/IP properties:
Now this is the incoming VPN clients TCP/IP Properties:
So, as you can see, Windows VPN server is set to use IPs from .10 to .15
When my phone connects, it always goes for the next IP address - if it hits .15, it resorts back to .10 and so on.
Whats happening is that your HubTwo is then seeing this IP address as being the one for the PC and the ONLY one. Until that connection isn't used for X hours, then it forgets it and goes back to 192.168.1.2.
Something changed the setup in the router to address my port forwards to the PC by name and currently recognised IP instead of its normal IP - and so each time there was an incoming connection from my phone (when just going out - to test it was working), your router has then directed that port to the VPN IP for that MAC address instead of the PC IP. Due to this, it has then looked like my incoming connection was being blocked by the mobile network - it worked at home on the nearest mast, but out of town on a different mast, no connection.
The logs could do with being more helpful too as it seems that for RDP connections a log entry is made regardless of an actual connection to the PC but VPN connections are only logged IF there is actually a successful connection established. Even then, a lot of the log entries don't make much sense to the average user - whats "Lan IPv6 Neighbour Discovery events: NEIGHBOR_SOLICIT" for instance? Whats "Self roaming might be occurring... Deauth original one..." mean?
"LAN [ADD] ARP 192.168.1.12 with 86:0a:66:fa:92:a3 from br0(wl1)" The device name has been set in the "My network" page, wheres the user-friendly name in there? - I don't remember MAC addresses in my head!
It has bugs! Factory reset doesn't wipe 200 odd pages of logging either. It should! That's what a factory reset is supposed to do right? - Put it back to factory new condition..