Need a home networking solution please.

You guys will like this one.

1 desktop - windows xp home
1 laptop - windows xp pro

1 dsl connection via SBCGLOBAL.NET
1 belkin wireless router.

Wife's laptop with XP Pro uses the Sonic Wall VPN client to connect to a network at the office. This is infrequent, but will be the case tomorrow, so I'll be able to try any solutions suggested.

The problem is, in order for her to connect to the company network, the MTU size has to be set at 1500 on the router. This doesn't work for me and since I work only from home, it really screws up my day since I can no longer use the internet, which I need to do my work. I need the normal setting of 1454.

Her actual browsing connection is being delivered by the company ISP, not ours.

What is interesting is, there are a very few websites that I can in fact, connect to. Like Google search and mail (thank God for my mail!) and even Belkin's own website. Beyond that, not much is available it seems.

Nothing against Belkin's outsourced support, but they were baffled and either had no idea what would solve the problem or, since it was not the router they would be supporting, would not answer the question.

Someone once suggested to me there might be a registry hack, which I'd be willing to try if anyone had an idea what it was. I'm even open to a different router as long as it doesn't cost half the national debt.

Sooooo? Anyone?

MJ

 

I guess no one has any help.

 

its kind of an obscure issue youre having, to me anyway. id talk to the company's IT support people. they have more than likely had this pass by them before.

 

havent tried this...

http://www.howtonetworking.com/VPN/mtu3.htm

registry hack

always make a backup of your registry if youre going to be editing anything in there.

 

Hell, I back it up even when I'm not screwing with it.

I hadn't figured on playing with her registry. I'd gone into my own and done a similar version of this fix under the logic that, if the router MTU was set at 1500, then if I set my desktop to 1454, the lower setting would take precedence. However, I think since the connection to the ISP has already happened, it doesn't matter.

My (exported) entry looked like this -
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NdisWan\Parameters\Protcols\0]
"ProtocolType"=dword:00000800 (2048)
"PPPProtocolType"=dword:00000021 (33)
"ProtocolMTU"=dword:000005AE (1454)

As far as contacting her IT people, they haven't been much help. I am pretty sure that Sonic Wall Server comes defaulted to 1500 and those guys over there in her IT department are so wrapped in customers they ignore their own internal customers. I've had to fix her machine more times than I care to think about. NTM, if they made a change for her, they'd have to do it for everyone. Their attitude is, if she can connect and do her work, there isn't a problem.

So it appears, looking over that fix on her registry, that I'll be adding similar entries without the ProtocolMTU value but with the TunnelMTU value. I would set that to 1500 decimal.

Correct?

I worked on some fairly large (my location>2000 users, mail, web, windows, Lotus Notes, Netware, terminal, RAS, SecurID, etc) networks before I went in a new direction. I can't ever remember changing the MTU settings for anything. I'm not even sure anymore if we had that. I Left IT in May of 2002. A lot stuff came preconfigured and we always had Novell's engineers on site when we did big changes or installs.

You'd think I could get a simple 2 user home network to work eh?

 

from the description, yes. looks like thats youll have to do.

having to alter default MTU settings in the registry after modifying new DWORD values isnt really basic networking in my opinion i think youre doin alright

let me know if this works or not