Thursday, March 18, 2010

Contivity VPN takes down network

Damn it I'm getting fed-up of the Piece O'S software from our bank, even when it manages to make a connection (assuming no other piece of software on that computer is trying to use the internet) it still manages to take-down the router occasionally.

I'd install it on another machine, but oh look it no installation instructions for Vista.

4 comments:

Orphi said...

Virtual machines FTW!

Seriously, it's a great way to minimise the interactions with software which is just too stupid to be allowed out of the house by itself.

Although… no matter how stupid it is, it shouldn't be able to upset your router. (Assuming it's a physically seperate device.) I know I have a router at home which dies if I click certain posts on the POV-Ray news server; this indicates a bug in the router software.

FlipC said...

Ah I'll expound, it is a separate router what seems to be happening is that the local IP address range is being screwed with. The internet connection is still there, but no local computers can talk to the router, until it resets itself.

Yeah probably a bug in the router, but still the software shouldn't be that crap.

Orphi said...

What I have seen happen is that VPN software wants to use the RFC-1918 IP address range, which is also what the LAN is using. There are three such address ranges, so the possibility of the collision isn't exactly remote.

FlipC said...

Yeah that would be my guess; the VPN is trying to set itself up as the name server in the same range and conflicting.