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Forum Discussion
Unknown/foreign computer connected in Insight VPN app computer
Hi I manage 3 small networks and use a single BR500 as the VPN router at the main one (office). I use the Insight Instant VPN software on various Win 10 Pro PC's to connect to this location from t...
I see these on the client side network browser only. Cossini-PC in this example.
Hello,
If you log into the BR500 local browser at each site, under the BASIC tab click on attached devices. Do you see these unknown devices listed at all under the attached devices list? Do the devices have an IP address in any of the LAN tabs?
Thanks for your interest. No there is only one BR500 in this scenario and there are only known and expected devices connected and shown in the LAN map. However I believe I have identified the issue here.
When looking at the VPN group list (on the BR500 web interface) there were always listed 6-8 virtual IP addresses that I did not recognise as being related to any login from one of my user devices/locations. My logins consist of three different PC/locations that I can recognise from the virtual IP address (windows/serial number not sure where or how that is derived.) So while none of these other virtual IP addresses ever appeared to be logged onto my BR500 they did appear there. They also never got on the list of recently remotely connected clients as shown on the Insight Instant VPN app. Nevertheless, I suspected something was wrong. This was being confirmed by the appearance of these other for all intent’s benign devices on my VPN.
My conclusion now is that maybe my choice of VPN group name was so simple and generic that another BR500 user may have been using the same group name. Now I would have hoped that this would be have been atleast caught by Netgear’s server or of no consequence, but I believe that is not the case.
I have deleted that first VPN group and recreated another with a much more unique name. Now none of the previous is occurring.
The COSSINS-PC is seen as the local machine's interface. This may come up when you have the media sharing/upnp enabled or samba/file sharing enabled on your local computer. Typically the machine will not see itself in the discovery process and was introduced when using the Insight's VPN service on the desktop.
We are looking to clean up this behavior and other behavior regarding the desktop clients communicating directly with one another since that was not the intent for the Insight's VPN service.
I hope this helps clear up any confusion regarding the host "COSSINS-PC".
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