Remote Desktop constantly reconnects when over OpenVPN

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GregBrrr

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Joined: Thu Aug 15, 2019 9:43 pm

Post by GregBrrr » Thu Aug 15, 2019 9:55 pm
I'm running Windows 10 1903, but this has been happening for years. I have a VPS hosted with Fasthosts.co.uk in their CloudNX product. If I disable the firewall I can RDP to the box and everything is fine, but obviously I don't want that, so I've enabled the firewall and their VPN which is built on OpenVPN. I can connect and that's fine, and I can copy GBs of data back and forth uninterrupted, however, when on RDP over the VPN connection, the RDP client constantly black-screens and pops the "The connection has been lost" reconnecting dialog, which always reconnects on the first attempt within about 3-5 seconds. This happens on my home broadband (Virgin Media 220 Mbps down, 22 Mbps up), thathered over my phone (O2 4G, 50 Mbps down, 30 Mbps up) and on the connection at my office (Gamma Telecom 12 Mbps down, 8 Mbps up).

I asked Fasthosts and they had nothing useful to say. I've googled and can't see anything addressing the issue. There's nothing in the VPN log indicating the VPN is dropping.

Does anybody know a fix for this?

Eric

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Joined: Sun Jan 03, 2010 3:27 am

Post by Eric » Fri Aug 16, 2019 12:23 pm
Hi Greg,

I'm afraid if the problem is not occurring with the firewall down, the firewall is most likely dropping or blocking the connection unintentionally after a period of time.

The only other possibility could be that your Internet connection may be dropping out, a short dropout could cause an RDP session to drop while the OpenVPN tunnel is unaffected, but this seems unlikely across multiple different connections.

The only thing we can recommend trying is dropping your MTU slightly. Try lowing it to 1450 first, then down in 50 increments and trying again. If you get to 1300 and the problem still occurs, I'm afraid going lower usually won't help. You can change your MTU by editing your connection and going to the Networking tab. Make sure you reconnect after you save the connection. For best results, change the MTU on the server to match and restart it as well.

Regards,
Eric
Eric Thorpe
Viscosity Developer

Web: http://www.sparklabs.com
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BDiggs

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Joined: Tue May 26, 2020 12:52 pm

Post by BDiggs » Tue May 26, 2020 12:55 pm
We are having this issue as well. Adjusting mtu size down did not help. Any other suggestions? Here's my context:
RDP Server: Windows 10
RDP Client: Windows 10 OOTB RDP client. Also tried the Remote Desktop (v10) client from the Microsoft store as well. Same result with either one.

Eric

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Joined: Sun Jan 03, 2010 3:27 am

Post by Eric » Tue May 26, 2020 3:26 pm
Hi BDiggs,

Like the original poster, I would suggest that it's more likely a firewall is getting in the way and getting confused at how it's trying to filter traffic. We do see this request every now and again via email to us and we're yet to find a situation where the user disabling firewalls on both the server and client end does not resolve the problem. I'm afraid we haven't had feedback though specifically what eventually resolves this issue for users, so I'm sorry we can't provide more information on that.

Regards,
Eric
Eric Thorpe
Viscosity Developer

Web: http://www.sparklabs.com
Support: http://www.sparklabs.com/support
Twitter: http://twitter.com/sparklabs
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