RV042 Firewall Slows VPN Traffic

[cbingenheimer]

Replaced an older RV042 that had damage from lightning. The new RV042 is V03 with firmware 4.0.0.7. This router supports 7 branch offices using site-to-site VPN to other RV042 routers. After connecting the new RV042 at the main office, three of the branch offices had very slow response over the VPN tunnel. I disabled the firewall on the new RV042 and the problem resolved. The three branches with the problem have Windows 7 systems and the other 4 have Windows XP. I confirmed that the Windows firewall was disabled on the Windows 7 systems.

I did try leaving the firewall enabled and disabling SPI, but that didn't help. Have to have firewall disabled to resolve the problem. I would not expect the firewall on the main office RV042 to affect VPN tunnel traffic, but apparently it does.

Any ideas why? Do we need specific access rules to fix the issue. It works fine with firewall disbaled, but I'd be more comfortable with it enabled.

Thanks for any assistance / suggestions.

[jasbryan]

Carl,

I would go ahead and upgrade to the latest firmware 4.0.4.02 , there have been 3 releases since 4.0.0.7 after the firmware upgrade i would factory reset the device and manually reconfigure.

http://www.cisco.com/cisco/software/release.html?mdfid=282414010&softwareid=282465789&release=4.0.4.02-tm&relind=AVAILABLE&rellifecycle=&reltype=latest

Hope this helps

Cisco Support Engineer

Jasbryan

[cbingenheimer]

Pefromed the firware upgrade, reset to factory settings, then manually reconfigured the RV042. The same problem exists. Enabling the firewall significantly slows the VPN traffic. The pc at the branch accesses an intranet site and the pages are extremely slow to display (more than 2 minutes) with the firewall enabled. As soon as we disable the ifrewall, pages are displayed in seconds.

As stated in the original case, this problem seems to affect the bracnhes with Windows 7 PCs. Each branch has just one PC and the RV042.  Some of the branches have an older RV042 with firmware 1.3.12-19, but the problem does not correlate with the old or new firmware. It does seem to correlate with the Windows 7 systems..