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I have a Windows XP and a Windows 2003 virtual machine(s) that have nothing but the CISCO VPN software as well as secureremote (checkpoint's VPN software) that I use to remote into some of my clients machines. These are currently running off a Vista 64 Ultimate machine and are in NAT mode

I prefer to keep them off my host machine because they both can have negative effects on other network stacks (including the vbox one it seems).

Up till 2.2.4, everything has worked great but starting in 2.2.4 there has been issues. the CISCO client is very unstable. Constant timeouts, disconnects, network communication errors. The checkpoint software stops working all together. Both of these use UDP to establish a IPSec tunnel.

I've tried playing w/ the MTU size thinking maybe the window was changed in the later versions of the network drivers but have been unable to get these to work stable. I even changed the network adapter type around (PCnet-Fast III, and the MT Desktop)

If I go back to 2.2.2, everything immediately starts working again as I expect.

I did a scan of the forums / bug reports (although i'll admit a fairly quick scan) and looked at the changed logs to see if I could isolate what's going on but really haven't ran across anything.

I'm happy with the stability and performance of 2.2.2 but wondered if anyone had any insight or suggestions on what might be causing these issues w/ 2.2.4 and later.

Thank you

Hi Dest,

I've got nearly the same problems - with an Ubuntu 9.04 host and XP / SP3 running in the box using the Cisco client using NAT.

But there are few differences. Running with 2.2.4 was great and stable, after installing 3.0.0 the VPN connection only last for seconds. VBox update 3.0.2 shows the same symptoms but in 3.0.4 the VPN is now stable again.

Greetings
Dieter

I have not yet tried 3.0.4 but will if you noticed that it seems to work

2.2.4 and 3.0.0 and 3.0.2 all had the same problems for me.

I have to believe that something is being done w/ the encapsulation packets during the translation.

I forgot to mention before that with 2.2.4 if I attempted to generate a new client cert for secureremote in the guest, it would crash the virtual machine. I did not attempt that in the 3.0.0 and 3.0.2 i tried.



Update: Just upgraded to 3.0.4 and while generating a site cert does not work still for secureremote under NAT it no longer crashes the VM. it DOES connect though in Nat mode so I'll have to test the performance.

It seems there is still a bug about source routing in the headers being wrong so that could cause the site cert issue, we'll see about performance