O2 and the mysterious case of the missing VPN
It may as well be a murder mystery. I’ve killed the best part of a week on this and I’m still without a satisfactory resolution.
The story goes like this. I rely upon a VPN connection to access the office from home. I don’t use it all the time but when something goes wrong and I need access to the servers its invaluable. I’m 25 miles and the best part of an hour away from the office. At some point the week before last my VPN stopped working. As with all the best stories there were sub plots and red herrings. In my case another user had lost connection which lead me to think it was the common denominator – the VPN access point. So after much investigation and test it turned out that in the other users case it was a forgotten password and the timing was pure coincidence. Armed with that knowledge I made some progress.
I had been hindered by the fact that the only place i could test from was my home office. Had I been able to try from elsewhere I may have spotted this earlier but having found that the problem was only affecting me I tried a little experiment. I disconnected my iPhone from Wifi, configured it for VPN and managed to successfully connect via the mobile data network. Reconnect to the Wifi and the connection failed. This pointed the finger squarely at my O2 router. After a bit of rummaging through support forums I found I was not alone.
I called O2 armed with this knowledge and the experience of previous callers. The first person I talked to said she was aware of the problem and I needed to talk to second line support. I found myself on hold only to be cut off. I called back. The second guy was in denial of the problem but I insisted to talk to the second line techies.. he cut me off. On the third attempt I got the “we don’t support VPN” that I had been warned about in the forums. He tried to fob me off on my works system administrator. That wasn’t going to work as he was talking to him. He tried a number of other excuses which didn’t work other than elevate my own frustration levels. Finally he said that the necessary tech guys don’t work weekends and he would get one to call me on Monday to schedule a firmware downgrade. Finally the result I wanted if not to the expected timetable.
Once off the phone I thought I’d try and sort it myself but O2′s tools are Windows only. I tried VMWare with a copy of Vista and the password was rejected. I tried another route with BE support but I needed a member login. Having gone round the houses I finally found a copy of earlier firmware and a Thomson update tool. (for those reading who don’t know O2 broadband is BE and the O2 Wireless Box II is a Thomson). Unfortunately I hit the brick wall of rejected password again. I know the the username SuperUser and the password O2Br0ad64nd is right as I can login via a browser. In the end I’d wasted more time.
I’ll wait for a call on Monday and post an update. In the meantime I’m going to research alternative Broadband suppliers. Its a shame as O2 to date have been great but this is a deal breaker. And if anyone from O2 is reading this I can say with an element of certainty that if you lose my broadband custom you will also lose 3 personal iPhone contracts (Vodafone with a Sure Signal Femtocell looks good) and it will be a nail in the coffin for your (large) contract at work.
Interesting to hear your troubles, as my VPN has also mysteriously stopped working, as of Thursday last week.
I’m yet to call O2, as I’ve been dealing with my own system admin to make sure the problem isn’t on our end. It appears not to be.
Let me know how you get on. I’ll be ringing O2 tomorrow morning. I really, really need this VPN!