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Posted Saturday 24th September 2011 at 6.22pm
VPN and DHCP
This is a bit of a technical post. I won't attempt to explain what all the words and acronyms mean, mainly because I don't know what most of them mean, but if anyone else has had the same problem then it could still be useful.
This morning I tried to VPN into a server in the UK. It wouldn't work. I tried Windows and Ubuntu, and neither would connect - or, occasionally, they would connect but then lose the connection within a minute or two. Sometimes they mentioned error 619. The router I have here is a Linksys WRT54G v5, which apparently has had a lot of problems with this kind of thing, so there are a lot of suggestions on the net that I tried and which didn't work.
It turned out to be something to do with both my modem and my router attempting to control DHCP for my computer. To fix this I had to log into my router (if you don't know the username and password for your router, the defaults are normally admin/admin or admin/1234 or admin/(blank), where (blank) means actually leave the box blank, don't write (blank)) and change the connection type from "Automatic configuration - DHCP" to "PPPoE". I then had to put in a username and password, which I think are the username and password for the internet connection (I'm not sure as I've just moved here and am using the network that someone else has set up). I saved those changes and hey presto, VPN now works.
I got this suggestion from here - their walkthrough includes things like restoring factory defaults, which I found unnecessary.
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