Hello,
I'm having a weird problem and I'm at a loss. We have a couple of cloud servers that form our remote office system. Basically, their is 1 DC, 1 Remote Desktop server, and 2 member servers being used as workstations. The users access these server and resources via a PPTP VPN setup on the DC using RRAS. Everything has worked fairly well for the last year, but recently, my users have complained that they get disconnected at random times over the last couple of weeks. I was able to observe the behavior yesterday and it goes something like this:
-The user is working fine
-The user tries to access a share, open a web page, tries to open a remote desktop session or notices that their Outlook client is disconnected and finds that nothing can be reached outside of the local machine. I tried pinging the DC address,www.google.com, and the RDP server without success. From the server, I tried pinging the errant workstation without success. The server shows the connection to be active and the workstation does not disconnect the connection. On
one occasion, the problem just rectified itself and everything started working again. On all other occasions, the VPN had to be disconnected and reconnected. Note that some workstations are not reporting this problem.
-The user disconnects the VPN
-The user reconnects the VPN and usually everything is okay again for awhile, but sometimes they are disconnected within minutes.
This is new behavior, and no changes have been made by me and the Cloud support people tell me they haven't done anything. At this point, I'm not even sure how to go about troubleshooting it. The next time it happened, I was going to pull an ARP table to see if anything looks amiss, but the only other avenue I have going is a call into the cloud services support to see if they can look for dropped or filtered information between our main office and our cloud server.
The only part of this setup that is a little bit different for me is the IPv4 settings in the RRAS console under properties of the server. Normally in the IPv4 settings, I select DHCP and allow the users to pull from the existing DHCP server. However, the cloud support recommended against having a DHCP server, so instead of DHCP, I selected "use static IP address pool." I put 10.216.8.197 to 10.216.8.22 and the subnet mask is picking up from the server as 255.255.255.224 and the default gateway is picking up from the server as 10.216.8.193.
Does anyone have any advice on how to troubleshoot this problem? What to try next if the cloud services support doesn't find anything, etc?
Thanks,
Jeffery Smith