A lot of the things I end up turning into “guides” start life as an e-mail or a forum post where I try to help someone with a technical issue. Once you get past a certain point, the effort needed to transform the post/e-mail/whatever into a more generic guide becomes quite small. Such was the case with this one – this started as a verbal explanation, then morphed into an e-mail and now finally becomes a general guide on the subject. Hopefully someone will find it useful – if so, I may even improve and perhaps illustrate it 
Printing at Home when Connected to a VPN
Technorati Tags: printing, vpn, routing, persistent routes, home networking, vpn, home, printing problems
Seaking of VPN, ever come across XP Home trying to connect to a Cisco asa5500 via cisco vpn 4.6 and when trying to negotiate the connection, crashing, causing the VPN Client Service to stop, and cvpnd faulting with Kernel32.dll ??? I am at a complete loss, as I have uninstalled and re-installed a bucket load of VPN clients right back to 2002 and same error. Virus and Malware free and no “weido” services running. Any Ideas ?? Ta in advance Cuz
did I say Seaking, meant Seeking and Speaking, me and my portmanteau’s ( check that out, me soo smlever !!!) LOL
No real idea – if it’s just one machine then it sounds like it’s something wacky in the IP stack, possibly the driver for the networking hardware, but that’s really just a guess.
I had an issue where the Cisco VPN client just stopped working on Windows – tried everything – no GPF, it just failed to connect. Eventually that laptop had Linux installed on it instead and vpnc works just fine…
Your fix for printing while vpn is on works for me. Thanks.
However, I’ve got two questions:
1. Is the -p flag for the persistent connection permanent? ie, one would only need to execute it once?
2. if we have several local networked printers that we’d like to access and fix, how would we do that? ie, would we have to execute the persistent -p flag command multiple times each with the specific printer IP address?
Thank you for your help.
1. Yes, the -p flag makes the route permanent
2. You can add each IP for each printer or you could have the printers in a specific range. For example, if you had all your printers addressed between 192.168.0.1 – 192.168.0.15 then you could add that range as follows:
route -p add 192.168.0.0 MASK 255.255.255.240 [IP Address of Router]