Telnet sessions die through VPN

[wraights]

I have some cottage workers that we have setup to use a VPN connection to us.

They are running 95 and have the Cisco client 1.1 on their boxes. Well we have some UNIX boxes that they telnet to and while working they will lose their connection to the UNIX boxes. Why?

I had other VPN users that don't have this problem. The only thing I can think of is this:

These cottage workers are running WIN95 on a 486. YES...I really mean a 486 processor. They have a cable modem and are connecting to us that way. So...what can I do to troubleshoot this. When they call me and tell me that they have lost their telnet session, I look on the firewall and see that they are still connected, but I don't know anything further to do to figure this out. The timeout I have for telnet sessions is 60 minutes, and they do sometimes lose their sessions when they leave it idle but sometimes (about half the time) they lose their connection while they are working.

THANKS in advance for helping!

[jeff]

Are they really running Cisco Client 1.1? Also, are they doing native (DOS) Telnet or some 3rd party app?

[wraights]

Is it that bad that they are? :-) I thought it was worse that they were running 95 on a 486.

Yes they really are. They are using a 3rd party app called QVT/Net. I have other cottage workers using that and it seems to work fine for them.

[jeff]

I would try 2 things: run a Telnet session from the DOS window and see what happens. This might tell you if its the 3rd party app that is dying on you.

Try running Cisco's latest VPN client (IF it can run on a 486 with Winold) and see if that helps.

[wraights]

I tried running the latest VPN client and it seemed to die on me. I couldn't get it to work correctly. It would connect but then it would lock the whole PC up. I was able to get telnet to work through a DOS window but I never tested it for an extended period of time. I will try that.

Thanks a lot!