I've been working from home for about a year-and-a-half, and connecting to the company VPN has worked fine for the most time, except on a few occasions, that I can't really explain.
Normally my laptop is connected wirelessly to my home network, receives an IP from my firewall, and has full internet access. Connecting to the company VPN (L2TP/IPsec with PSK and l/p) works as expected.
Yesterday, I took my laptop to a client, I didn't even connect to a network while I was there, and finished my work there.
Back home, connected to my network again and full internet access, all attempts to connect to the VPN suddenly fail, and gives me either a The network connection between your computer and the VPN server could not be established because the remote server is not responding error, or a The L2TP connection attempt failed because the security layer encountered a processing error during initial negotiations with the remote computer error. I have not touched any setting either on my laptop, or any of my network devices.
This has happened before, also immediately after I took my laptop elsewhere.
I had not found a solution back then, and after a few weeks, the problem apparently resolved itself. The IT department could also not explain the issues I had.
Today, I made another attempt to resolve and make sense of the issue. I've read somewhere that I had to check if the service 'Routing And Remote Access' was up and running. It was actually disabled, so I turned it on. After that, I could indeed connect to the VPN again. Problem resolved.
I checked with a few colleagues (with working VPN connections) if their 'Routing And Remote Access' service was enabled and running. They all confirmed theirs were Disabled.
I've also checked on my private W10 devices and it was disabled on all of them, so it must be the default W10 setting.
I'm still in the dark what was causing my VPN issues, I hope someone can explain
- What could possibly change in my network environment/settings that may cause these issues, after I take my laptop to a different network environment? (without actually connecting to any network there)
- What is the service 'Routing And Remote Access' for exactly, and how does it relate to my VPN connection?
- Does it make sense to have this service enabled to be able to connect to VPN? (My colleagues are doing fine without)
Additional details: I got a new laptop for work last week, fresh installation. VPN worked without problems with the default windows configuration. Used this new laptop at the client's location yesterday, and VPN broke after that.
I still have the old laptop up and running. However, that one was also not able to connect to the VPN anymore after that. I had to enable the same service to get that one working again.
IT dept still has no clue.
