VPN connection drops between 20 and 50 minutes

[davecity65]

Hi All,

I've got an SA520W firewall device that is causing me some problems when I'm connection remotely from home via VPN.  I use the Mac OS X built in IPSec client and it works well in the sense that it is fast and I can get to any machine/server at my office.  The only problem I run into is that anywhere between 20 and 50 minutes, it drops the connection.  I don't think it's a time-out issue since I could be in the middle of typing a sentence and it would drop me.

I've done only the basic configuration out-of-the-box and pretty much took all defaults that were presented to me.  I used Cisco provided documentation to create the firewall settings and connections.  I do have the latest firmware loaded.

My short-term resolution is to configure the one extra static IP address as port-forwarding and that works.  However, we need multiple concurrent connections to the office and we really need to use the VPN function.

I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced like this.  I can certainly provide settings if any of that info will help.

Thanks in advance,

David

[adam]

Have you had any luck getting help with this?

[davecity65]

Hi Adam.  Unfortunately, I haven't gotten very far and right now I'm just reconnecting whenever it drops (yeah, that's a pain).  As far as I can tell, I'm pretty sure it's the appliance that is dropping the connection and not the client.  I wish I could get a copy of the Cisco Mac client to see if that would make a difference, but I don't have any connections to get that.

I did look at a third party VPN client but the one that I looked at (can't remember the name) didn't have clear instructions or examples on how to configure it so I couldn't get that to work from the get-go.

I scoured the Internet one night looking for sample settings (like the MTU) for the appliance but found none that were different than my existing settings.  I'm sure there's an answer out there, so I'm hoping to eventually stumble across it.  Perhaps a future firmware update will surreptitiously straighten it out.

Thanks,

David