I am located in the Middle East, and connecting to a VPN in New York. Some time in the past couple of weeks, something appears to have gone wrong with the routing, such that it is now impossible for me to get a strong enough VPN connection to open an RDP window to the NY servers. The most basic operations are taking forever. I complained to the network admin in NY and he insisted there was nothing wrong with the VPN there. So I tried logging onto a different server (not on the VPN) in Amsterdam, and using an RDP window there to connect to the VPN. Lo and behold, the connection is flying, with no apparent slowness. I can open a nested RDP window to the NY server via Amsterdam, and it's as fast as if I were working on my local machine.
The funny thing is, I did a tracert from both my local machine and the Amsterdam server to the VPN host, and both of them look equally horrible:
From my local machine (some details edited out for privacy purposes):
C:\Users\Shaul>tracert vpn.mydomain.com
Tracing route to vpn.mydomain.com [96.47.x.x] over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 37 ms 1 ms 1 ms my.firewall [192.168.14.1]
2 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms [192.168.100.1]
3 22 ms 23 ms 22 ms [212.179.37.1]
4 22 ms 22 ms 22 ms [212.179.14.54]
5 23 ms 23 ms 23 ms [212.25.77.6]
6 23 ms 23 ms 23 ms [62.219.189.94]
7 78 ms 84 ms 78 ms 213.242.116.29
8 180 ms 178 ms 179 ms vl-3101-ve-127.ebr1.Marseille2.Level3.net [4.69.141.189]
9 * * * Request timed out.
10 * * * Request timed out.
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 * * * Request timed out.
13 * * * Request timed out.
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 * * * Request timed out.
16 158 ms 158 ms 154 ms ae-2-52.edge2.Newark1.Level3.net [4.69.156.41]
17 166 ms 166 ms 159 ms THE-NEW-YOR.edge2.Newark1.Level3.net [4.30.130.234]
18 200 ms 158 ms 161 ms cs20.cs90.v.ewr.nyinternet.net [96.47.77.102]
19 154 ms 156 ms 155 ms cs90.cs99.v.ewr.nyinternet.net [96.47.77.42]
20 * * * Request timed out.
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 * * * Request timed out.
23 * * * Request timed out.
24 * * * Request timed out.
25 * * * Request timed out.
26 * * * Request timed out.
27 * * * Request timed out.
28 * * * Request timed out.
29 * * * Request timed out.
30 * * * Request timed out.
Trace complete.
And here's the tracert from the Amsterdam server:
C:\Users\Administrator>tracert vpn.mydomain.com
Tracing route to vpn.mydomain.com [96.47.x.x] over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms [37.58.x.x]
2 2 ms 1 ms 1 ms [159.253.x.x]
3 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms ae8.bbr01.eq01.ams02.networklayer.com [50.97.18.236]
4 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms ae52.edge6.Amsterdam1.Level3.net [212.72.47.125]
5 * * * Request timed out.
6 * * * Request timed out.
7 * * * Request timed out.
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 * * * Request timed out.
10 * * * Request timed out.
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 75 ms 101 ms 75 ms ae-1-51.edge2.newark1.level3.net [4.69.156.9]
13 75 ms 75 ms 75 ms the-new-yor.edge2.newark1.level3.net [4.30.130.234]
14 79 ms 79 ms 79 ms cs20.cs90.v.ewr.nyinternet.net [96.47.77.102]
15 77 ms 77 ms 77 ms cs90.cs99.v.ewr.nyinternet.net [96.47.77.42]
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 * * * Request timed out.
18 * * * Request timed out.
19 * * * Request timed out.
20 * * * Request timed out.
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 * * * Request timed out.
23 * * * Request timed out.
24 * * * Request timed out.
25 * * * Request timed out.
26 * * * Request timed out.
27 * * * Request timed out.
28 * * * Request timed out.
29 * * * Request timed out.
30 * * * Request timed out.
Trace complete.
In other words, the same timeout is happening in the tracert on both my local and the Amsterdam server, yet the Amsterdam server is connecting to the NY VPN without any trouble, while my local machine connects at glacial speeds.
Any explanations for this? How to work around it? I can double-hop via Amsterdam for some basic operations, but I really need to be able to connect to the VPN directly.
FWIW: My local host is Windows 7, the Amsterdam server is Win 2008 Server R2. No idea what the VPN host is, but I suspect Windows something.
EDIT: Fortunately we have a redundant ISP. When we switched to the backup, the VPN connection was fine. But I'm keeping this question open, so that if anyone has a solution for people who don't have a redundant Internet provider, they can answer here.
