Running over VPN

[edgray]

I am having troubles running NX4 over a VPN. I am getting incessant lockups. I am aware that UG does not support running over a VPN, but I was wondering if anyone has found anything that helps. License borrowing is not currently an option.

 

[looslib]

It all depends on your VPN setup.
Are you running NX locally with the VPN only used for license data?
Or are you running as a remote desktop over VPN?

I have run both ways in the past usually with no issues.


"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."

Ben Loosli

 

[edgray]

I am running locally with the VPN for license only.

 

[hudson888]

It's easier to set up in general if you're camped on a fixed IP address. Licences will be generally be served at ports 28000 or 27000 for older ports, depending on how you're authenticated over a VPN you may need to take some of those factors into consideration. Apart from that the traffic you need to exchange to serve a license is so small that it is hard to see what might be snagging you!

Best Regards

Hudson

www.jamb.com.au

Nil Desperandum illegitimi non carborundum

 

[edgray]

My knowledge of the ins and outs of VPN is nearly zero. my best guess is that it is some kind of latencey issue. I do not know where the license server is relative to my access point on our corporate net. Our corporate net is quite slow. we are in the process of upgrading our lines. I do not know the reason that UG does not support running over VPN. Does anyone know what is the cause? When I ping my VPN servers I get between 45ms and 65ms. One server seems to be about 5ms faster, and I thought that I noticed a slight reduction in lockups when running on that server at one point.

 

[NXMold]

Are you sure that losing a license causes a lockup? I just get a popup message indicating UG is going to close.

If UG crashes or becomes unresponsive, the VPN license server is the last place I'd look.

NX 6.0.2.8 MoldWizard

 

[FrankHa]

I Experienced this kind of behaviour over a VPN connection, and it turned out to be that the VPN lost contact (some sort of timeout?) and reconnected itself. If I was doing something in NX that needed a licence check, it would freeze up for a while until the VPN was running again.

After a while I figured out that it happened due to the VPN reconnected, so I simply started a command window and typed:
ping -t license.server.ip.adress

And then I let it run minimized, pings every second, but makes sure the VPN won't timeout, it solved the problem for me, but I ping the server 3600 times in an hour ;-)

(unfortunately the ping-period in windows cannot be altered, but a .bat file with a loop and sleep should be able to solve that)

 

[hudson888]

Frank may have something. The license looks for the presence of a server every so often using something called a heartbeat check. I gather that some VPN's don't maintain a permanently open connection in the same way that less secure networks might, this may itself cause sufficient latency to frustrate the licensing traffic. How to fix it is less simple. Personally I don't think a license needs to be inside a VPN, but convincing BOFH to keep port 28000 open to outside traffic for this purpose can be like pulling teeth!

Best Regards

Hudson

www.jamb.com.au

Nil Desperandum illegitimi non carborundum