Sonicwall Global VPN disconnecting repeatedly

For a while now I’ve had my Sonicwall Global VPN policy on the firewall set as a “route all” connection. This means that all traffic for the VPN client goes through the Sonicwall directly, and blocks access on the client’s end to local devices.

 

Yesterday I came upon a situation where I needed to enable a client access to both the VPN and local devices at the same time. This called for Split Tunnels!

However, I didn’t want to enable split tunnels universally for all my VPN clients. Luckily I found this Sonicwall documentation on setting up a single WanGroupVPN with two different policies based on user group.

The premise is that you set up your Wan GroupVPN as a split tunnel, but then give certain users access only to a specific address object and use a specific NAT Policy (I won’t regurgitate the entire document here).

This was working great, but I shortly found that when testing as the split tunnel user, I would get connected and then disconnected within 10 seconds. Typically the connection would last for 3 successful pings.

After a bit of Googling I found this article which explained it being caused by an incorrect address object within the “VPN Access” tab for the user.

I checked that out, and strangely enough, only the correct item was listed:

I looked at both the “Everyone” and “Trusted Users” group and it looked the same.

 

After a lot of head scratching, I finally discovered that in fact the “Everyone” group did have “All Interface IP” object applied to it, by viewing a logged in user’s status here:

Click for large view

Somehow that was still selected for the “Everyone” group, but it just wasn’t displaying when viewing the “VPN Access” tab. So I clicked “remove all”, and then re-added the appropriate objects, and problem solved!

 

Processor & RAM upgrade on Dell R410

Have I said before that I love virtualization? Because I really, really do.

In my original Hyper-V implementation, I used two Dell R410’s, each with 32 GB of RAM (4 sticks) and 1 Xeon 5630 processor. It’s been a little bit of time since then, with some additional VM’s brought online for various services. My benchmarks showed it was time to upgrade the cluster, mostly for RAM failover amounts; I can’t go below 50% available RAM otherwise all the VM’s won’t be able to run on one host.

So I called up my Dell rep, ordered 2 x Xeon 5630 and 8 x 8 GB of RAM, and today installed them.

Intel Xeon

 

The install went very smoothly, and because of the Hyper-V cluster and Live Migration, occurred in the middle of the day without downtime or interruption.

This is the process I used:

  • Manually drained a host (Windows Server 2012 will have this as a feature, which is nice).
  • Performed Windows Updates and a BIOS update from Dell
  • Restarted the server, and entered BIOS setup to ensure latest version applied successfully
  • Turned off server, slide out from the rack (Man do I love the RapidRails).
  • Opened up the chassis, removed the shroud covering processors and RAM
  • Added 4 sticks of RAM
  • Removed the CPU filler, and inserted the new processor.
  • Attached the passive heatsink, and screwed it into the mounts.
  • Turned on the server.

And that’s it! Just like that, I’ve doubled the capacity of my infrastructure, and it took under an hour.