VPN question - two connections possible?

[mpcook]

I am now working from a home office about 3/4 time, and so is my wife. We both work for the same company (that's another topic!) and access the company servers via VPN (Cisco). We have now discovered that we cannot have more than one laptop connected via VPN at a time. When one logs in, the other gets booted off. We have DSL going into a Linksys G router. My wife is hard wired to the router and I am on wireless. I was able to troubleshoot our connection problems to let the IT guy know what the problem was. I am now waiting for him to come up with a solution. We also usually have a couple or three non work laptops online also, not going through VPN.

This must be a common problem, I am hoping someone is aware of a simple solution. I would like to avoid having all of our traffic (all laptops) going 100% through the company VPN as that will (1) use up bandwidth and (2) it's not always up and running, I don't want to have to depend on it all the time.

Any VPN experts out there?
TIA,
Mike

[bill bolton]

We have now discovered that we cannot have more than one laptop connected via VPN at a time.

There are probably attributes on the corporate end of the VPN connection which can be set to accommodate this, but it will depend on the security policies of the corporation concerned as to whether those attributes are permitted to be set to achieve what you are looking to do.

Cheers,

Bill B.

[ajkula66]

Mr. Bolton is on the money when he states that it's the corporate end of the network that needs to be addressed.

I've been using VPN via WWAN and dial-up (I know, it sucks) simultaneously with two different user IDs and what not, so it's definitely possible.

How do you go about it in the given case...you will need a word (likely more than that) from the inside...

Good luck.

[mpcook]

The journey continues. After IT tweaking on the server side in various ways, and updating the client software, I received this note. Now they are checking out my router to see if it's "compatible" or configured properly. I have a Linksys WRT54G configured with mainly defaults right out of the box. I think it is a most common piece of equipment. It has been working endlessly fine for a year or more. I know only enough about networking to get into trouble, so this makes no sense to me!

From IT:
Q. Can two laptops be connected with the VPN Client from the same location?

A. Two clients can connect to the same head end from the same location as long as the clients are not both behind a device performing PAT such as a SOHO router/firewall. Many PAT devices can map ONE VPN connection to a client behind it, but not two. In order to allow two VPN clients to connect from the same location behind a PAT device, enable some sort of encapsulation such as NAT-T, IPSec over UDP, or IPSec over TCP at the head end . Generally, NAT-T or another encapsulation should be enabled if ANY NAT device is between the client and the head end

[bill bolton]

enable some sort of encapsulation such as NAT-T, IPSec over UDP, or IPSec over TCP at the head end . Generally, NAT-T or another encapsulation should be enabled if ANY NAT device is between the client and the head end

Your WRT-54G is definitely a NAT device.

Cheers,

Bill B.

[mpcook]

Sometimes the simplest solution works best. It guy asked me to download and install the latest Cisco VPN client. The one on my wife's T43 was pretty old. That did the trick. No changes needed to my home network or hardware.

Mike