Windows 2008 R2 VPN Service — Clients Disconnected

Question

I have set up a MS VPN server on Microsoft 2008 R2 Server. There seems to be a problem where some clients get disconnected after just a few seconds.

They can access machines in the VPN network with ping but the connection drops shortly there after. I have found no useful logs on the client or server even with extended logging. As far as the server is concerned "The reason for disconnecting was user request".

I started having this problem as a client with Linksys E3000 router (Tried all sorts of VPN pass through settings and different firmwares). When I switched back to my WRT54GL DD-WRT router I was fine. Another client is having this same issue with a netgear WNR3500. The VPN server is behind a Linux router with NAT but I have tested connections from multiple networks simultaneously and it seems to be working fine with the pptp and gre modules.

So I figure these home routers just often don't work well with the PPTP and IPSec VPNs. My questions are:

1. Anyone else had this issue?
2. Are there any options on the server that might help me work around this that will make the VPN service a little more home router friendly?

Answer 1

After making it so the VPN server was no longer behind NAT the problems seem to have been solved. I think have NAT twice happening for an IPSec tunnel might have just been too much. The solution to have it work while behind NAT might have been to set up NAT-T on the server and client as described in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926179 but I think this was the route of least resistance.