For the past week I’ve had agro from two of our users who have recently had new laptops and been unable to vpn into our network. The vpn connection is established but no traffic is passed through to the lan. The weird thing is that the wireless card on one of the machines would pass traffic but the lan connection wouldn’t. I spent about 5 hours troubleshooting this last week and thought I had a working solution until the next morning when it stopped working again.
This morning I spent an hour systematically working through symantecs troubleshooting guide and finally found this document:- Symantec VPN Client connectivity problems on IBM ThinkPad Laptops and guess what these new laptops are?
Turns out that IBM include some special software that automatically work out where you are connected and fiddle with the tcpip stack appropriately. As soon as I removed the IBM access software from running tasks I was able to ping the network – I was SOOO relieved as I really was starting to get worried about how I was going to fix this problem.