XP's IP info occassionally needs "kick start" over static VPN conenction?

[Robert Gordon]

I have a point to point hardware based VPN, which connect my home network
which uses DSL, to my office network which uses a T-1. Clients on my home
LAN receive their IP addresses from my home VPN router/firewall. Their IP
addresses all contain DHCP scope information consistent with my office's LAN
(i.e. DNS servers, domain suffix, etc.)

When I attempt to bring my office laptop home (which is a member of my
office's Win2K3 domain), and hook it into my home LAN, initially I can get
access to all company resources without issues. I can log directly onto the
domain, and access Outlook, filers, etc.

However, within an hour usually, the laptop appears to "forget" the
information associated with the IP address it received. The only two ways I
can get the laptop to behave as expected again, is to do an "ipconfig
/renew" or else do a reboot.

An example:

At first logon, I can ping SERVER.mydomain.com immediately without fail.
Also pinging just SERVER works fine because XP properly adds my DHCP
assigned corporate domain suffix at initialization. After an hour or so,
pinging
server.mydomain.com or just server, results in a long pause followed by a
"host not found" error.

If I then do an "ipconfig /renew" pinging server.mydomain.com or just
"server" works again without issue.

Any ideas?

 

[Gary Davis]

Check with your system administrator and find out with the lease time is on
the DHCP server.
It may be set too short causing this problem if the VPN connection is
getting a IP address from the DHCP server.