Persistent static route stops working after VPN drops and reconnects
- by user76157
I've got a VPN between two networks, one home and one office (A and B). Their subnets are: (A) 192.168.1.0 and (B) 192.168.0.0
The two networks have identical ADSL routers. Unfortunately these can only do dial-out VPN. So I've got a Windows 2008 server on Network B acting as a VPN server (ServerB). Network A's router (RouterA) passes through Network B's router and connects via PPTP to ServerB. RouterA is assigned the static IP 192.168.0.40 on Network B.
There's a persistent static route on ServerB telling it to use 0.40 for all requests to Network A's subnet, 192.168.1.0. (route -p add 192.168.1.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.0.40). This enables ServerB to ping all machines on A (and those machines to ping ServerB).
The VPN connection occasionally drops (I'm not sure why - it's set to remain always on and seems to drop randomly). This wouldn't be too much of a problem, as it reconnects automatically and quickly, except that when it does reconnect, the static route on ServerB no longer works.
Route print (on ServerB) shows that the persistent static route still exists. However a tracert to a machine on Network A doesn't use the static route; it tries instead to use ServerB's default gateway (which is RouterB), and fails to find the machine.
Deleting and re-adding the static route fixes the problem - a tracert uses the static route. At the moment, a batch file to delete and re-add the static route is scheduled to run every day. But this is clearly far from an ideal solution!
I hope that's not too confusing. Any help would be very much appreciated.