After spending a couple of weeks worrying that I’d have to be plugged directly into my router to connect to my work vpn network, with my Dell D830 Lattitude laptop and Windows 7 64 bit, I finally chanced upon the solution. It turned out to be a device manager setting and potentially a setting in the BIOS on my D830 dell latitude (bios revision A14).
Follow the following steps if you are suffering the same issue yourself…
1. Changed the MTU setting on the VPN device...
2. Changed a setting in the bios, which dictated that the wifi connection should be turned off when another connection is available (i.e. LAN or 3G).
UPDATE: 23:15 15 January 2010: Actually I’ve just discovered the real route of my problems. Turns out that if my router (3com office connect adsl wireless 11g firewall router), assigns an ip address that is in use by one of the virtual server LAN IP addresses, on either wireless connection or LAN connection, then the VPN software fails to connect.
What actually happened was when I plugged another router into my firewall router, I got assigned 192.168.1.3 to my laptop wireless card, which wasn’t one of the entries in the virtual servers table, and that’s why it started working.
I’ve double checked this now, by assigning an ip address to my LAN cable connection to my router that is in use by a virtual server, and hey presto the VPN software fails to connect again.
UPDATE: 11:43 16 January 2010: Ran the windows 7 diagnostics utility on the wireless adapter, and it detected a problem of no DHCP Enabled on the adapter. Ever since this setting has been applied, and re-starting the ncp-e.com software I’ve been able to connect fine.
