Hi,

Since lockdown two of our work laptops have been used at two different home locations, using SmartVPN to then RDP to their work PCs on the work LAN using SSL VPN. Whilst the laptops were at work they had, and still have, fixed IP addresses of 192.168.0.x.

They've both been plagued with connection problems (intermittent dropouts needing reboots) whilst in the home environments, that I thought may have been down to dodgy WiFi. One of the laptops is very stable when plugged in to ethernet whilst the other one is only marginally better when plugged in.

Today I manage to learn that both of their home routers are usng the same subnet addressing as the work LAN i.e. 192.168.0.x addresses. I guess this might explain the intermittentness of the problems however the laptops are behaving very different to each other when ethernet is used (one stable, the other not).

Regardless of this difference between the laptops, having the same subnet is not a good thing for stability. I could force the two home workers to change their routers default configs to use a different subnet. I certainly don't want to change the work LAN addressing.

What's the best way to make this work without conflict?

Thanks

DanSW wrote:
They've both been plagued with connection problems (intermittent dropouts needing reboots) whilst in the home environments,

Regardless of this difference between the laptops, having the same subnet is not a good thing for stability.

Though it's a far from ideal situation for a variety of reasons, I wouldn't have thought 'intermittent dropouts' and lack of stability would necessarily have resulted from this.

You would expect Routing issues and maybe DNS issues (through querying the 'wrong' dns server, that sort of thing...).

FWIW, I think your original hypothesis (dodgy wifi) would be nearer the mark.

Thanks, I thought so too but couldn't be sure and just trying to eliminate obvious issues. It's difficult troubleshooting in the current climate as ideally I'd like to see the laptops in situ at their homes...but can't