RV180W Site-to-site VPN Lags

[leonhemeryck]

Hi;

I recently setup RV180Ws with latest firmware at two sites and created a site-to-site VPN between the two.  Four (4) users in the remote office RDP into the terminal server via the site-to-site VPN and they also map a drive to a share on the server via the VPN.  This all seems to work fine, however, the users are complaining that they experience several 20-30 second "lags" or "stalls" throughout the day with their RDP sessions.  I changed the MTU on the remote site RV180W from 1500 to 14xx and that helped for about a week but they are now saying it's happening again.

Of course, ISP says everything is fine in their end.

Any suggestions or thoughts?  My next step is to sit at the remote site and anaylze traffic to see if I can trace where these delays come from.

Thanks in advance,

Leon

[mpyhala]

Leon,

What type of internet connection on each side?

Who are the ISPs?

I'm wondering what prompted you to change the MTU. Did you perform an MTU test or just guess that it should be 14xx?

Unless one or both of the routers is failing, I would look closely at the ISP(s). The RV180 should provide a solid and stable tunnel.

- Marty

[leonhemeryck]

Thank you for the reply.

ISP is cable on both ends: Rogers on remote site & local cable ISP at main office (I'm told Rogers bought this small local ISP recently).

I did some mtu fragment checking & that's why I dropped it to 14xx. Helped for a while but issue is occurring again.

I suspect ISP as well & may just need to convince them to dig deeper (they just want to get me off the phone it seems)

Sent from Cisco Technical Support iPhone App

[mpyhala]

Leon,

The normal MTU for a cable provider is 1500. DSL should almost always be set to 1492.

One way to troubleshoot the connection is to start a continuous ping to a public DNS server from the command prompt:

ping 8.8.8.8 -t

Watch for high latency replies (>50ms) and dropped packets. If you see problems, consider connecting a PC directly to the modem and test again. This way you can rule out or rule in an issue with the router. If there is a problem with the router in place but not with the modem, it is likely a negotiation problem. Change from Auto-Negotiate to Full Duplex manual 100Mbps or 1000Mbps, depending on the capability of the modem.

If you see no issues with the internet connection, test a continuous ping through the tunnel to a server and see if there is any issue. You may need to adjust the tunnel settings slightly.

Please keep us updated.

- Marty

[leonhemeryck]

The ISP has agreed to replace the cable modem so I had that done late yesterday and will keep my fingers crossed!

Leon

[andym8674]

hello,

would like to know if the ISP devices that were swapped resolved the issue, i have a similar setup using same RV180W's, the users dont use RDP so would not see the connection issue but i have heard reports of the machines internet connection running slowly\not responding periodically throughout the day, the issue lasts upto 20 seconds.

when the VPN SA is about to expire, when it is re-established i assume this would be transparent to the users working across the VPN?

[mpyhala]

Andrew,

when the VPN SA is about to expire, when it is re-established i assume this would be transparent to the users working across the VPN?

Yes, VPN negotiation should be transparent to the users and should happen very quickly.

- Marty

[andym8674]

thanks :-)

[mpyhala]

Leon,

That is good news. Please keep us updated.

- Marty

[leonhemeryck]

Will do, I just emailed my user contact and asked her to keep me posted on any lags, stalls etc the next couple of days since the cable Internet modem was swapped out last night ....

[leonhemeryck]

Users are still complaining of "stalls" throughout the day so ISP replacing cable modem did not resolve :-(

I notice today there is a new version of firmware (routers currently have version 1.0.3.10 and there's a 1.0.4.14 on the Cisco download site).  I will apply this latest firmware this weekend ...

Leon