Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Problem with MS Terminal Services / VPN

There is a problem with Terminal Services from Microsoft and/or Cisco's VPN product. When using the Cisco client and VPN with Terminal Services and my connection gets disrupted in some way when I am connected to my server, first of all I cannot reconnect to the VPN. Somehow the VPN/firewall thinks I am still connected perhaps or maybe the services on my machine get corrupted in some way and causes this problem.

The second problem is that after a reboot (potentially restarting some services would also resolve this) and I reconnect to my VPN, Microsoft Terminal Services on the computer to which I was connected says all the Terminal Service sessions are in use and I cannot get back into my box. This is a potential security problem if someone else was able to connect to that particular session. It doesn't make any sense that I would show as still being connected because one particular account is supposed to terminate on disconnect or log out and so I should be able to get back in on that account after the network disruption.

On the flip side, I've had a problem where a particular account using Terminal Services is NOT supposed to shut down on disconnect, and when I get booted off the VPN via a network disruption, that account would shut down even when in theory it should not. It seems like maybe that problem was fixed but a new problem has arisen as a result of whatever changed.