IT ISSUE · NETWORKS AND CONNECTIVITY
VPN not connecting
Four things sit in the path and any of them can stop it. Where it fails tells you which.A VPN sits between a person's home internet, their device, their identity and your office equipment, and any of the four can stop it. Where it fails usually tells you which, so the first useful information is whether it fails to connect at all or connects and then carries nothing.
What you may notice
- It fails for one person and works for everybody else.
- It connects but nothing inside the office is reachable.
- It works on the phone network but not at home.
- It stopped after a laptop update.
- It disconnects after a fixed period every time.
Establish where it stops
We check the client and device, the account and any authentication in the path, the connection from that location, and the equipment at the office end.
There is also a question worth asking while this is annoying everybody. A VPN is often still there because it always has been, carrying access to two or three things that have since moved to services reachable without it. If that is true here, the most useful outcome of this fault isn't a better VPN, it is a shorter list of reasons to need one, and eventually not maintaining it at all.