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Hopefully some TAMBers can suggest something here as I have run out of options.

I often work from home when not in my London office. I access my office's network through NCP which is a secure VPN my work use. My ISP is BT Broadband and for the past 2 years I have had no problems. However on Wed an error message I got on NCP/VPN was translated from my work IT people as port 4500 (secure port) on my router being blocked or filtered and thus meaning my home workstation was unable to receive encrypted info from my office network.

My office are in no doubt this is the issue and it would seem to be confirmed as I could log on through NCP by using my neighbours ISP. My dealings over two days or so with BT have been horrendous - call centre staff in India who manfully try and help but are clearly not equipped to deal with such queries. I had to sign up to an extra £10 a month on my BT subscription to get access to a technical team of engineers who essentially confirmed that no ports are blocked. They did remotely access by home computer and did something around the ports on the router but am not sure what. The upshot is my BT broadband works fine but I am still getting the same error message and my work IT team Maintain it still to do with a problem with router port 4500.

Hope this all makes sense - can anyone suggest what I can do or what I can ask BT to do? I've done the usual switching on and off in attempting to reboot back to original settings but still not working. In trying to work out what has changedI cinsid that I have no ability or knowledge to intentionally make any changes to settings or download a firewall (onto my home Mac) which may have altered any settings. Even if I downloaded something unintentionally BT would have picked up on it when accessing my home computer remotely. Essentially BT are saying there are no problems with the port but something has clearly changed in the space of a week.

I would change provider (although I am wondering if I would lose my annual advance payment of line rental to BT) if it would guarantee it would fix it and the fact my NCP/VPN works with next doors ISP suggests it would work with a new ISP and therefore new router settings. However I am concerned I go through the hassle and time of changing ISPs only to find the problem remains and it is say a legacy issue connected to the line.

As you can probably tell I am not particularly strong in this field and have tried to best undestand the information relayed to me. Does anyone think they know what the problem is and/or better still, know what I can do to fix it?

Many thanks.

Edited by Return of Yermaw
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Most likely to be a problem with your mac or router settings. Turning your router off and on will not set it back to its defaults. You have to specifically do that.

Your ISP rarely (if ever) block ports and certainly your line has nothing to do with a port being blocked.

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Your ISP rarely (if ever) block ports and certainly your line has nothing to do with a port being blocked.

BT do....we have many users who at home cannot connect to our VPN, they are all BT, BT said they haven't blocked any ports but they have...

The only reason i can think they do this is to force folk that work from home onto their BT business ADSL

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We use Cisco AnyConnect VPN for our remote users and have never had any problems connecting BT users, even those using the dreaded homehub.

I ken this doesn't help the OP but perhaps try another router? i.e. not a homehub <_<

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Guest BlueGaz

Thanks to all for advice.

OLAS - could you explain what you mean by this? Explain it to me as if you were talking to a child! Many thanks.

The Terminal app on your Mac mate. Looks like ........

terminal-icon-osx-300x262.png

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Dunno if its related but our BT hub occasionally blocks the TAMB. Kills it dead, wont load. We need to reboot the hub to get back on. Which as you can probably tell by my posting history only happens when the missus can be ersed doing it...

Spoken to BT, they say there's no problem at their end, even sent us a replacement hub - but made fukkal difference. Only happens with the TAMB...

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Dunno if its related but our BT hub occasionally blocks the TAMB. Kills it dead, wont load. We need to reboot the hub to get back on. Which as you can probably tell by my posting history only happens when the missus can be ersed doing it...

Spoken to BT, they say there's no problem at their end, even sent us a replacement hub - but made fukkal difference. Only happens with the TAMB...

I once had a crap router that would block URLs if they were accessed too often. Claimed it was virus protection. Restart was the only way to remove the block.

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One other thing to try would be to put your mac into the DMZ on your BT HomeHub.

To do this you'll need to set up your computer to use a static IP address

http://osxdaily.com/2010/12/17/set-static-ip-address-mac/

Then on your BT Home Hub set this IP address as the one for the DMZ

See sample video at

This will mean that no ports are blocked for this specific IP address.

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If you use DMZ, you really need a good firewall as every port is exposed to the outside world.

You probably just need to port forward 4500 from your router to the computer you use.

Olas your PM Box is full...need to send you a message..

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hello again. Despite BT's maintaining throughout that the problem lay with my work's servers/IT, it would now seem that the problem lay with BT:

https://community.bt.com/t5/Other-Broadband-Discussions/Incoming-Messages-Being-Blocked-on-Infinity-Affects-VPN-and/td-p/1521487

Throughout the whole episode, I have found BT's customer service to be shockingly bad - and that is in comparison to experiences with the notorious customer service and structure of TSB, Scottish Power and various insurance companies. I imagine BT are passable with a straightforward issue, but anything around IT that is not covered by their call centre script just goes down a black hole.

The upshot is that I had to take out an additional package of 10 quid a month to get BT IT Technical support (a contract I am locked into apparently for 6m) to get a (supposedly) qualified engineer to look at the problem I was raising. For this ten quid, I was simply told my routers are open, there are no blocks to my VPN and it is an issue with my employer. The attached thread confirms that was not the case.

All now resolved, but I would advise anyone who uses broadband for work to go to anyone but BT. I now start my battle to get out of my Tech support contract and get reimbursed. I am not optimistic.

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hello again. Despite BT's maintaining throughout that the problem lay with my work's servers/IT, it would now seem that the problem lay with BT:

https://community.bt.com/t5/Other-Broadband-Discussions/Incoming-Messages-Being-Blocked-on-Infinity-Affects-VPN-and/td-p/1521487

Throughout the whole episode, I have found BT's customer service to be shockingly bad - and that is in comparison to experiences with the notorious customer service and structure of TSB, Scottish Power and various insurance companies. I imagine BT are passable with a straightforward issue, but anything around IT that is not covered by their call centre script just goes down a black hole.

The upshot is that I had to take out an additional package of 10 quid a month to get BT IT Technical support (a contract I am locked into apparently for 6m) to get a (supposedly) qualified engineer to look at the problem I was raising. For this ten quid, I was simply told my routers are open, there are no blocks to my VPN and it is an issue with my employer. The attached thread confirms that was not the case.

All now resolved, but I would advise anyone who uses broadband for work to go to anyone but BT. I now start my battle to get out of my Tech support contract and get reimbursed. I am not optimistic.

Good luck with that. BT are pretty useless unless it's off the shelf stuff.

I'm with Talk Talk and they've been ok for the last few years. Early doors their support was mince but it's been brought back to Europe from the far east and it's much better now.

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hello again. Despite BT's maintaining throughout that the problem lay with my work's servers/IT, it would now seem that the problem lay with BT:

https://community.bt.com/t5/Other-Broadband-Discussions/Incoming-Messages-Being-Blocked-on-Infinity-Affects-VPN-and/td-p/1521487

Throughout the whole episode, I have found BT's customer service to be shockingly bad - and that is in comparison to experiences with the notorious customer service and structure of TSB, Scottish Power and various insurance companies. I imagine BT are passable with a straightforward issue, but anything around IT that is not covered by their call centre script just goes down a black hole.

The upshot is that I had to take out an additional package of 10 quid a month to get BT IT Technical support (a contract I am locked into apparently for 6m) to get a (supposedly) qualified engineer to look at the problem I was raising. For this ten quid, I was simply told my routers are open, there are no blocks to my VPN and it is an issue with my employer. The attached thread confirms that was not the case.

All now resolved, but I would advise anyone who uses broadband for work to go to anyone but BT. I now start my battle to get out of my Tech support contract and get reimbursed. I am not optimistic.

Rarely has a truer word been posted on the TAMB. Of all the crappy, shitty and downright shockingly bad service dished up by various companies in the UK, the 'service' provided by BT is the crappiest, shittiest and downright shockingly worst of the lot.

Avoid. No matter what.

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