VPN Weirdness

[Jerry]

I set up a business VPN on ne of my computers. It is a slave running
Windows 7 Home premium, one of four computers in my setup. The VPN
connected without affecting the Input Director connection at all.
That is, I was clicking and typing on the VPN'ed slave just as
before. The weirdness is that when I moved the mouse off the slave
and then went back, the mouse DOES show up on the slave and move
around, but the Input Director on the master pops up and tells me that
the machine has failed to respond and do I want to skip it. If I say
no, the focus is back on the master, and if I say yes then the slave
gets skipped as you would expect.

I understand all the reasons why the VPN shoudl make this not work,
but it does work, until the master decides it is not getting a
response. I looked for a way to set the response timeout, but
couldn't find anything. Any suggestions on how I can make the master
ignore the lack of response? Or any other suggested fix?

[strudel]

Jerry,
I have a similar setup. One computer on a VPN and another without the
VPN. Both are connected to the LAN with a wire. I solved the issues
with the VPN by enabling a wireless connection on the computer that
connects to the VPN. In Input Director, I force it to use the
wireless adapter. Initially, I say that the VPN used the wireless
adapter to connect to the corporate remote server... I did not like
that fact, so I now force a manual IP address in the wireless
connection and the DNS fields are empty (the ip is reserved in the
router) . That way, Windows and the VPN are not using it for WAN
traffic. Input Director has full bandwidth to transport the mouse,
keyboard and clipboard data. Works great!

Hope this helps,
-strudel

[Jerry]

Thanks very much for the reply, but I don't have two networks I can
run. What I was really hopng for was a way to adjust the slave reply
timeout. If I could set it to say, 8 hours, I'd be great. :)

[Jerry]

Okay, turns out the Master preferences tab scrolls. lol Sorry I
missed it before.

So there IS a setting for slave timeout, but it won't allow a setting
greater than 10 seconds. Is there some real logic for that Shane? I
would really like to set it to 28,800. :)

[Shane]

Hi Jerry,

If the slave isn't able to communicate with the master then Input
Director won't function properly (or at all really). It sounds to me
like there is something blocking the return traffic from the slave to
the master. This is usually always the VPN security policy (or
firewall) - are you able to check to see if there is a setting that
you can change that might relax the VPN security policy?

Regs,

Shane.

[Jerry]

Shane,

Thanks very much for the reply. I'm sure you're right concerning
the blockage. Frankly, I'm very surprised that this works at all once
I connect using the VPN. But it does work in all ways except for the
master dislking the lack of a reply. I can certainly understand if
you're convinced that setting the reply timeout to be unlimited would
cause a problem, but my (admittedly limited) testing here would imply
that setting the reply timeout to be very high would make me a happy
camper. (The VPN is controlled from work and there's nothing I can
change on it.)

(I'm sending this response from the VPN'ed computer right now. As
long as I never leave this monitor after the VPN connects, I can work
here all day.)

Jerry

p.s. Thanks for 1.2.2. :) I'll be trying it out shortly.

[Eric_T]

I did have a very similar problem:
- VPN from work, no user control over any VPN feature
- IF the mouse was on the master when the VPN started, then sometimes
ID would continue working, sometimes it would not
- IF the mouse was on the slave then everything would freeze until I
use the hotkey to bring the keyboard back to master

After a lot of testing I figured out that the 'sometimes working' part
was related to my laptop having both a wired & wireless link into my
home network. As soon as I disable one of the two, the VPN would
ensure that ID was no longer working at all.

Eventually I found a fix: the VPN messes up my local routing table
(read: it removes a route to the local lan) and because of that, no
networking on the local lan is possible (no ID, but also no printing,
no drive mapping, nothing).
So now I launch a CMD prompt after the VPN connection and type 'route
add 10.x.x.0 MASK 255.255.255.0 10.x.x.y' where the last address is
the ip address of my laptop prior to starting the VPN.

This re-establishes the route to the local network and makes my
printer, drive mappings and ID work like a charm.

This trick may work for you as well, it certainly won't hurt giving it
a try ;-)

Eric

[Chan]

Eric,

This is the first encouraging thing I've ever seen on this issue.

One clarification please. Does this work for you with just one
connection enabled or do you use one for VPN and the other for ID?
And does printing to your local network also work with this setup?

thank you

chan

[Eric_T]

Chan,

This works with only a single connection and yes, printing to the
local network does also work.
In fact it is the printing that was the main reason for me to find a
solution, the fact that ID now works as well is more the icing on the
cake.

A cmd file to do this semi-automatic (you still have to run the cmd
file manually, there's no way to automate that) looks like this:

#most home routers use the 192.168.1.0 subnet
#VPN kills the internal route to that subnet, so let's delete it
route delete 192.168.1.0
#assuming your local pc's ip address is .50 we can add the route to
the local network again
route add 192.168.1.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.50
#let's ping the printer to see if it worked
ping 192.168.1.10

copy/paste, update the ip subnet and address info to match your
situation and give it a go.

Success,

Eric

[dave]

I'm having issues with my work laptop on my home network and using
ID. My work laptop is a Domain member for the work domain, but uses
my home internet connection through a LAN cable to the router just
fine. Whether or not I connect to my work VPN, ID on the home system
as master refuses to see the work laptop as the slave. My home system
runs Vista Ultimate x64, the work laptop runs Windows 7 Enterprise
x86, but it wouldn't work when it had Vista x86 either. Would this
routing fix resolve that as well, or is this a limitation of ID due to
the laptop not being a 'member' of my home network?

[Mcegan69]

Eric,

Its 5 years later, but I just wanted to post and say thanks for this. I was having an issue similar to OP where after connecting to the VPN on my company issued laptop, I was able to get Input Director to transfer control, and all seemed well until I get an error message 2 seconds later complaining that the slave wasn't sending a reply. I tried what you posted and it works perfectly now. Really made my day.

Here's some more tips to get what he's saying to work for you, in case some parts are unclear.

• The commands need to be ran on the machine you're using a VPN on.
• To open a command prompt, go to the bottom left, click the windows icon, type in "cmd" and hit enter.
• If you get the message "Elevated privileges needed" when you enter in the commands, make sure you are running in administrator mode. To do this, after typing in "cmd", instead of pressing enter, right click the icon that appears and press "Run as administrator". Hopefully you have administrator privileges on the machine you're using...you may not if its work issued.
• To find the subnet, in the command prompt window, type "ipconfig" and hit enter. Where it says "IP4 address", that's the local IP address of the machine you're currently on. "Local" in this case means the IP address that was assigned by your router to this machine. The subnet will be the first 3 portions. For example, my machine's local IP was 192.168.1.185. So my subnet for his instructions is 192.168.1, which is the same as what he said above as its common among many routers. If yours is different, simply replace it wherever 192.168.1 appears in the instructions.
• When he says "your local PC's IP address", he means the machine you're running the VPN on. This address can be found via the ipconfig command as well, right next to the "IP4 address". The caveat here is you want to run ipconfig before connecting to your VPN; if you do it afterwards, you will probably see a completely different ip address that won't work.
• Unless you manually set it up to be static, your machine's local IP address may change in the future depending on what the router decides. In that case, if you were using a script to perform Eric's steps, it will begin to fail. Just keep that in mind in case you have problems in the future.
• So then with all that said, the steps are to first figure out your machine's local IP address, either via ipconfig (remember to run before connecting to the VPN) or some other manner. The first 3 portions of your local IP address is the "subnet" to be used in the steps. Now connect to your VPN. After that, just perform the "route delete" and "route add" steps in Eric's original post and your Input Director, local printers, etc should automagically begin to work again even though you are still connected to the VPN.

Thanks again Eric, really a life saver.