Windows drive mappings over VPN

[kevburgess]

Morning,

We have an established IPSec VPN between a Cisco 2611 and a Cisco 3005 that seems to be working well and nothing out of the ordinary shows up in the logs. However, users on one end of the link seem to lose their drive connections that are mapped to the server at the other end of the link about every half an hour of inactivity. If they reboot, the connections are restored. I was thinking that the ISP may be dropping the low priority UDP packets that Windows is sending out. My question is whether the ISP router would be able distinguish the nature of the UDP packets, since they are encapsualted within the IPSec ?

Any help is appreciated,

regards,

Kevin

EDS Innovations

[lisa.hall]

Most SP’s don’t regulate the “type” of traffic but most certainly they’ll see your IPSEC UDP packets as any UDP and won’t be able to distinguish the packet from any other. Now if they are running your connection through a firewall that automatically closes unused or inactive connections, then it could drop the tunnel. But it doesn’t sound like that’s happening, more like you’re just losing the mapped drives but the tunnel remains open. Strange issue. Have you talked to Cisco about it yet?