Continuous Ping but Rdp Drops Frequently

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Problem at one site frequently losing connections to server running RDP

• Question

• We have over a hundred client sites making connections to our RDP server, and all but one are having no problems. The one may lose a connection to the server up to 3 or 4 times in 5 minutes - you will see the RDP client "reconnecting". Sometimes, the reconnecting will occur for 2 or 3 attempts before it's successful. All locations have independent Internet connections with various firewalls. The one location that is having a problem is using a Sonicwall TZ 105 firewall, and we've had two people look at this firewall to see if a problem can be found on that device. I don't know what firewall the other locations are using. A TCP timeout setting was increased from 15 minutes to a day. We didn't expect this to help, because we can have a lot of problems even in a 15 minute window, and it ended up not affecting anything. We've upgraded the firewall's firmware to the latest version.

  We can't ping the RDP server from this location, but we have done a continuous ping to the last hop that is available, and there may be an occasional drop, but the total is a fraction of 1%. I know that having ICMP connectivity doesn't mean that TCP isn't having a problem, but the connection seems stable.

  Does anyone have a thought as to what we might look at? Thanks

Answers

• Hi,

  Some suggestions/questions:

  Have you tried swapping out the firewall at the problem site with a completely different make/model?

  Have you run a pathping and/or pingplotter from the problem site to the server to see if they show any potential problem points?

  Have you run pathping/pingplotter from the server to the public ip of the problem site?

  Have you looked at network traces (netmon, wireshark, etc) from each end to see if there are any clues?

  I recommend you contact the ISP for the problem site first, show them the pathping results, show them the packet loss, explain the problem you are having, etc.  Also you may need to contact the ISP on the server side as well depending on where it looks like the problem is.

  When I have seen this type of problem it usually turns out to be a problem with one of the routers along the path from the problem site to the server.  By contacting the ISP they are usually able to fix the router and/or change the route to force a different path and/or contact the ISP responsible for the problem router and have them fix it.

  -TP

  • Proposed as answer by Friday, February 7, 2014 3:13 AM
  • Marked as answer by Dharmesh S Microsoft employee Monday, February 10, 2014 2:19 AM

• We don't own the remote site, so we haven't tried to swap out the firewall, but we can probably send them a loaner firewall. I'll work with our manager to coordinate that.

  I normally hop right on wireshark to troubleshoot problems like this, but I hadn't done this yet. Thanks for the reminder, and I'll

  I did do a traceroute, pathping, and normal ping before I sent this off, and no problem is noticed. We can run the ping to the last responding hop for 30 minutes and have well under .5% packet loss. Even when the RDP session times out, we don't see ping timeouts. I'm pretty sure it's not the ISP but the firewall. I just downloaded and installed pingplotter, and all hops along the way stay in the green for the round trip time.

  We found another location with almost the same firewall (TZ 105N vs. TZ 105) - the N version isn't having the problem. The location that's having the problem just has this firewall installed a couple months ago about the same time they signed up for our services. We don't have any history to check this against.

  It will take a couple days to get a firewall to them.

  • Proposed as answer by Dharmesh S Microsoft employee Friday, February 7, 2014 3:13 AM
  • Marked as answer by Dharmesh S Microsoft employee Monday, February 10, 2014 2:19 AM

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Source: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/e40aac70-788e-43a2-8b1b-7b31aa8dbd16/problem-at-one-site-frequently-losing-connections-to-server-running-rdp?forum=winserverTS

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