A few months ago I switched from using Cisco’s QuickVPN software to the ShrewSoft VPN Client for Windows. I’m not going to get into the issues that I had with QuickVPN-it wasn’t very reliable. I’ve had ShrewSoft VPN for Windows v2.1.7 connecting to a Cisco RV082 VPN router. ShrewSoft provides instructions for how to connect to a similar LinkSys router here. After the setup, I was able to connect to my VPN router on the first connection attempt.
I’ve noticed a couple of times that if I close my laptop and it goes to sleep while the VPN software is connected to the VPN router, when I open the laptop and reconnect to the VPN router, the connection is successful, but I can’t ping any of the IPs on the exposed subnet. Most of the time I remembered to disconnect the VPN prior to closing the laptop. The couple of times I haven’t, I simply rebooted. I finally took the time to look around and figure out what the problem was. I came across the following post on another blog.
I restarted the three ShrewSoft services as described with an elevated command prompt window. I established a VPN connection and it worked.
If your laptop sleeps while running a ShrewSoft VPN connection (to a Cisco router) and you can’t connect to the exposed internal IPs after successfully establishing a connection later, do the following:
net stop "ShrewSoft DNS Proxy Daemon" net stop "ShrewSoft IKE Daemon" net stop "ShrewSoft IPSEC Daemon" net start "ShrewSoft DNS Proxy Daemon" net start "ShrewSoft IKE Daemon" net start "ShrewSoft IPSEC Daemon"
As Mr. Anderson wrote, I hope this also saves others time.