Man, ever since WFH become a regular thing for 75%+ of our staff, our helpdesk gets these calls/emails every single day. And guess what? There’s never a problem with our VPN.
“But it was working fine for me yesterday…”
“I can still browse the internet just fine… but the VPN/RDP keeps dropping me…”
“My kids are streaming YouTube Ok…”
Always people using WiFi too. I’m sure the same vanilla access point that their cable provider gave them. Tons of overlapping signals/channels for neighbors and businesses nearby. Magically, you tell them to reboot their router, or try using a physical cable and all the problems seem to go away. They still believe something was going on with our end even though there’s dozens of people connected for hours and hours without issue.
Amazingly, whenever I work from home (2-3 times a week) for years on end now, I don’t think I have ever once had an issue connecting and/or being disconnected.
It is NOT us. It IS you.
/rant
EDIT: I did just recall one time when the problem wasn’t technically either of ends. There was a Spectrum latency issue in our neck of the woods one day so WFH users on Spectrum where experiencing disconnection/latency related issues. I only knew something was up because two of our IT staff called me saying they were having issues… so I knew something was off.
EDIT 2: Holy cow this blew up. Thank you all for your empathy and for your commiseration. Misery loves company… and I am feeling the misery
My internet is fine, I have the best satellite connection I can get at my cottage in the middle of nowhere, it’s always 5Mbps which my son’s friend’s cousin that knows computers tells me is more than enough.
Something similar happened about a month ago. Our HR Director’s home office is in a part of their house where they don’t get a strong Wi-Fi signal from the main floor. Their spouse has been meaning to upgrade their home access point since 2020 but hasn’t.
When they try to WFH their internet is intermittent, so they call IT. Every time we run a speedtest remotely (not on VPN) and confirm it’s a signal quality issue.
Similar to our last “annual budget meeting” where everyone who is responsible for proposing a budget crams into one room with their laptops for the tutorial on using the budgeting website.
So we get to “ok everyone, log in and go to your dashboard…” and the site is at a complete crawl. It doesn’t take long for murmurs and some snide comments about WiFi and IT.
I check the AP utilization: 20%. Speed test: 30Mbps. Other websites seem a little slow but not snails pace, so I assume it must be the budgeting site. My hunch is confirmed by someone on Teams saying “it’s not loading for me either”.
But no one notices that; it’s IT’s fault for not having better wifi.
After about 10 minutes it starts to load normally. I’m guessing that since our account only has maybe one person logged in at a time that the compute resources needed to scale up to accommodate almost 40 people trying to log in at once.
Yeah this has been a problem. “There is something wrong with the VPN, you need to fix it because I’m tired of being kicked off.” Orly, because the other 20 people that have been connected for hours are perfectly fine, so obviously it’s on our end. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact you live in the middle of nowhere and have frontier dsl that can hardly hold a 5/1 connection! I tired to explain the why websites and YouTube can manage her shit connection better but its pointless. Now I just delete her emails lol.
I never have an issue working from one using a VPN. Why? because I have quality equipment. The end users just go to walmart and buy the $59.99 wifi router and turn it on and use it. Then the kids are streaming youtube, twitch, tik tok and porn.
The best one was I get a call from a user “My VPN is not working. Why is this so unreliable?” Ma’am we have received no other calls about the VPN in the last month. Then in the background I hear a teenage boy scream WTF happened to the internet. then a reply of It was slow so I unplugged the router 5 minutes ago and just plugged it back in. My user turns away from the phone and starts screaming and cussing the kids as she has shit to do. Then comes back to me and says OK I found the issue. Sorry to bother you…
Edit to add: Try having a person living on the side of a mountain building a home while living in an RV in the middle of nowhere using a Verizon hotspot hooked to a SonicWall. This has been the best overall experience I have had with a VPN…
My next door neighbor works for Spectrum. He had more internet problems than I did with it going out randomly. I NEVER had that problem.
Turns out the power we get to our homes isn’t the most stable. I put a UPS on ALL of my networking gear everywhere. So when the power flickered I could keep going and he would drop his connections as the router and/or modem rebooted.
What I’ve learned is if you rely on your internet, and you work from home; a UPS is essential!! I’m trying to tell everyone I know because it’s already saved me and him so much heart ache.
My favorite part of all of this is that I’m in Rhode Island and a HUGE chunk of the state is on the 1 cable provider that isn’t FIOS and the state is tiny. So any time one of these tickets start to show up, I know there’s dozens more coming from different clients.
The super common problem child ones have been trained better with the basic “reboot your router” / “here’s a bookmarked speedtest site and if it’s lower than this, try calling Cox” guide. Hell, a few will just legit not put a ticket for any issue until they’ve done that. It’s kinda fun. Totally unrelated problems like a program not opening and they’ll still reboot the router, call their ISP and run a speedtest first because they’re afraid of my disapproving tone of voice
Aye, when we first moved over to working from home so many people (read: higher ups) who thought it would be nice to buy a gigantic, ex-farmland property started blaming us for connectivity issues.
Mate, your in the arse end of nowhere, in a house that requires twenty six access points to cover the property and it’s all powered by your 3.6 Mbps “broadband” connection.
Yes we’re happy to pay for your hotspot bill but you don’t get any signal either.
Wipe away your tears with a tissue, fourth floor, eighth bathroom on the left.
100%. I love the blind confidence some people display when putting in tickets. “VPN is down, please fix” like no, it’s not. I’ve been connected since yesterday without any interruptions.
I had one of these last week for Horizon remote access. I feel like the user in these cases is always super passive-aggressive. I’m going to just copy and paste from my Teams with this user to give you an idea…
“Same think, still not working……what’s it gonna take to get back running correctly???”
“It work flawless for me for over a year on my win 7 laptop until something happened”
“I really need to get this working. Have a lot of work to be completed over the weekend…Thanks!”
And then of course after me insisting that nothing is wrong with our UAG’s/conn servers/load balancer, his desktop pool or the application volumes or ANYTHING ELSE. I insist that he tries from another external connection.
“Looks like its on my end…Something is going on with my T-mobile Home box. Took my set-up to my parents house and it worked fine. Thanks for your help”
It’s still frustrating that some of these get escalated to a Sr. Sys Admin instead of dying out at the helpdesk, but hey, that’s life I guess.
Had one guy that had us setup a firewall at his mountain retreat so he would not have to use a VPN client, got it configured, shipped to him, he set it up and then started bitching how terrible the wifi was, wouldn’t even work in the next room. I tried everything I could think of then handed the ticket off to a less frustrated coworker… He tried a few things and called the customer, suggested that we could order high gain antennas to swap out…
“Antennas? This thing has antennas?” Yeah some came with it…
Wouldn’t ya know suddenly his wifi worked flawlessly?
I dealt with this for years before I just started requiring users give a screenshot of https://speed.cloudflare.com/ before they’d be issued WFH equipment.
That information is invaluable in convincing management it’s not your problem when you can show their connection was just fine a year ago and now suddenly their latency is terrible compared to everyone else.
I’ve checked IPs and found users on 4G hotspots when they promised they had cable. I’ve seen users with pings measured in seconds because a squirrel chewed through their cable but it was still “working fine”. I’ve had users move to the middle of nowhere and switch to satellite internet and then try to blame us because “you guys must have changed something.”
Make sure any of your people on Cable ISPs didn’t end up with Puma modems! Despite all the major issues (especially with UDP VPNs), they’re still making these modems, and in some cases, it’s not easy to tell if you’ve got one, except by FCC ID (example: the XFinity XB7CN is both a Puma modem and a non-Puma modem, depending on which one you get)
These issues are why, in 2020, I wanted to get the COVID-19 free 6-month trial of 1000 eyes.
From what I read they have a device client that measures latency, bandwidth, and connectivity to services my business needs to operate. Supposedly it could record wifi signal strength at the WFH device also.
I reached out to the them for the trial. All I got was an invite to a webinar with broken audio by a non-English native speaker.
When Cisco bought them I thought to myself, “F this. Out of my price range now.”
Oh, I just had a client with a simmilar sharepoint issue. They have tons of sites, tons of folders in folders in folders in folders…you get the point
The thing is somebody told them he heard of a “trick”. After you sync the website, go to teams an click on sync ON EACH FOLDER INDIVIDUALLY so “it syncs faster”
Of course, almost everyday “this stupid sharepoint is not working”. Unsync everything and sync it again. Just 170k files over 600gb.
When I was done, she was like “what do you use instead of this shit. Clearly you work with something else.”
“No, ma’am. Sharepoint for us too. Sometimes more small files than you ever saw, sometimes really big files. Never had a problem. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
