Server/client over router

[Crashless]

Originally Posted by kltye

Actually our building's internal network runs at 100Mbps... I think my G card doesn't like G-rates: Doing a bandwidth test between two G machines I get 11Mbps TOPS. Pretty frustrating.

What routers are you using? Pretty much every consumer-level router I've seen only connects to a WAN at 10mbps.

If you connected your computers directly to the wall, that's a different story; but it's not what you have mentioned in this thread.

[bhageman]

I'm a networking amateur but I have a Belkin wireless g (as fast as 54Mbps, slowest I've seen is around 34Mbps) network and i am able to stream via the Sage client to my laptop machine in my bedroom (1,200 sq ft apartment, wireless router and bedroom laptop are at opposite ends of my apartment). I did bump up the size of the cache per an old post (from Nielm, I think). That removed the very rare glitches I was getting.

For outside my LAN, I use Orb. It's free and it works great. I work an occasional Saturday shift and little does anyone know that I spend the slow times of the shift watching TV. My GF also accesses my Orb account from her apartment. She can stream via her b network from her DSL connection. I have Comcast high speed 6Mbps down, 750Kbps up.

Maybe I've just got good networking karma...

[kltye]

I'm using Linksys (WRT54G) and Belkin (F5D7230-4) routers. My encoding bitrate is around 6.5Mbps, with VBR enabled.

I know this is slightly off-topic, but when I enable RRAS, the VPN client manages to authenticate, but when "registering my computer on the network", it kicks me off with Error 733 (no protocol could be negotiated). I have a DHCP server running on that server as well, and I have set the VPN connection to automatically acquire IP. If you can shed some light as to why this is happening, I'd be very grateful

bhageman: Sorry for my ignorance, but what is Orb? Also, if I so much as step out of my dorm room, I have no hope of streaming my video without any glitches. It sounds like your video bitrate is pretty slow if you can stream using your 750kbps upstream...

[ke6guj]

I haven't had to deal with a 733 error before, so my help will be limited. However, I threw some google-fu at the problem and did learn some stuff.

Question, is this error coming when the client is trying to come through the router to complete the VPN, or while you are testing within your LAN? I would try to VPN within the LAN to make sure your VPN settings on the server are correct, then you know it is a router issue. I always try to remove as many "extras" as possible when troubleshooting, always make sure the core-feature works, then work your way up the list until you get a complete configuration.

But anyways, back to the troubleshooting, if the VPN wont even work while on your LAN try this. on you client, disable or enable "Negotiate multi-link for single link connections" in the VPN connection settings, that may help. You have the client set to automatically acquire IP, that should be fine, now in the RRAS, you can tell it to have the client get its IP through DHCP(have you disabled the DHCP server on the Linksys router?, you don't want 2 DHCP servers running here) or you can set a range of IP addresses that the RRAS can assign to the VPN client. Try that, some people have seen success doing that.


Now if the VPN works internally but doesn't work over the router, then we need to do some more tweaking of the router. you already have tcp1723 forwarded to the server, and vpn (pptp) passthrough enabled? Make sure that you local networks on each router are running different subnets, such as 192.168.1.x on the linksys and 192.168.2.x on the belkin. you need different subnets so that your client can properly send traffic through the VPN. Ok, just looked at the manuals for both routers, and that just happens to be the default subnets for each router so that should be fine.

So, like I said, keep testing up the line til you figure out where the VPN breaks, internally, through your router only, or when it goes through the second router. It sucks, VPN isn't supposed to be this hard.

[bhageman]

www.orb.com

The Orb software automatically tests your bandwidth and then streams at the appropriate bitrate.

Originally Posted by kltye

bhageman: Sorry for my ignorance, but what is Orb? Also, if I so much as step out of my dorm room, I have no hope of streaming my video without any glitches. It sounds like your video bitrate is pretty slow if you can stream using your 750kbps upstream...

[kltye]

The VPN wouldn't work even internally. After playing about with the RRAS properties, I managed to get it to work. Actually, all the settings are almost identical to before, except I changed the routing ability from LAN & WAN to just LAN. I'm just really happy it works now

Orb sounds very interesting, but since it requires one non-standard opened UDP port, I doubt if it'll work for me over the Internet because this darned building is NAT'd and they won't open ports for me even though I have my own public static IP....

[ke6guj]

Glad to hear that you got it knocked out. Does it work everywhere now the way you want?

[kltye]

Originally Posted by ke6guj

Glad to hear that you got it knocked out. Does it work everywhere now the way you want?

Yep it does; goes even beyond my wildest expectations Enabling software compression helped a little for streaming video.

[ke6guj]

Sweet.

Just one thing to keep in mind for the future. If you ever hook up your client to somebody's network and their subnet is the same as your internal network, you can have some issues when you fire up the VPN. Linksys routers are popular, and they usually default to 192.168.1.x which I'm assuming your network is, unless you already changed it.

Either you get to reconfigure your friend's network and any other network with that subnet or take some time to reconfigure your network so that it is using a less-popular subnet. It'll pay off in the long run. I still kick myself for not changing a client's network from their original 192.168.1.x network to something less common when I started upgrading their systems. It's too big to do it now, but if I had it to do over. Whenever we need to set up VPN access to the network, guess what network they are usually using at home, 192.168.1.x since it seems that everybody has a linksys router.

[kltye]

Ah thanks for the advice. Actualy I default to the 192.168.0 subnet since that was how I originally configured early networks I set up. I'm guessing that the route tables in Windows will get confused about where to forward certain packets... It'll be interesting to see what really happens though...

Thanks for all the help!

[ke6guj]

You're welcome.

Dlink routers usually default to 192.168.0.x, IIRC, so just keep that in mind if you ever try to VPN through a Dlink router.

Yup, the routing tables can get confused if both sides of the VPN are on the same subnet. It won't know wether the address is local or remote. It may keep all traffic internal, or send it all over the VPN.