BT Business Hub, cannot establish VPN Connection with TP-LINK VPN Routers

[Adam321]

Hi all!

I am in desperate need of some advice, help, moral support!

We have two office locations, lets call them Office A and B, both have a BT Business Hub as the Internet Gateway. Behind each of these there is a TP-Link R600VPN Router.

On each of the BT Business Hubs I have set the VPN Routers to be set to DMZ+ mode, so firewall is disabled, all ports/applications are allowed. They then receive the BT Business Hubs external IP address (Office A and Office B).

I have set up the VPN Routers following this article on the TP-LInk Website, obviously using the TP-LINKR600VPN intructions.

http://www.tp-link.com/en/article/?id=380

However once set up is complete, I cannot see any tunnel established. In the Logs on the VPN router I can see the following error,

phase2 negotiation failed due to time up waiting for phase1.

On some freak occurance I have managed to get the VPN to establish once, and able to Ping computers from one office to another. This happened when the BT Business Hub was powered off and on, while the VPN Router stayed on.

Reading on the BT Troubleshooting and FAQs I found the following article.

http://btbusiness.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/12764/c/426,3098,3099,3108

Which basically says that the Business Hub can lock the port used for VPN connections! So maybe when the Hub was restarted, the VPN router got to the port first and established the VPN before the Hub could lock the port. But I can't keep turning the Hub on and off in an attempt to get the VPN to work, as the VOIP Phones also run off the BT Business Hubs.

I tried to contact BT via the online chat service. However they couldn't provide anything useful, even when stating the BT business FAQ article tells me to contact them!

If anyone has been in this situation before and knows a solution, or knows of anything I could try, it would be greatly appreciated.

Many Thanks

Adam

[Adam321]

Hi all,

Just to give an update to the situation and provide some information if anyone else is in the same situation.

I have managed to find a solution and now have the VPN up and running between the two locations, utilising the BT Business Hubs.

The solution that I found worked, was to get rid of the IKE aspect of the VPN, this is what I could see as failing in the Logs on the TP-Link VPN routers and also in the BT Business Hub Firewall logs. Obviously the Racoon IKE Deamon on the VPN Router and the BT Business Hub, didn't want to play nice.

However the TP-Link VPN Router offered a Mannual setting for establishing the VPN Tunnel instead of the automatic IKE Deamion. Setting this option allowed the VPN Tunnel to connect on the first try, and has been up every since (nearly 5 days now). And computers at each location can communicate and access shared folders, drives, printers etc...

Many Thanks

Adam