I just want to share my experience with the Netgear community in case it helps someone else.
I've been working at home like many people the past number of months and we upgraded from the standard Xfinity modem/router to an Orbi system (RBR40 Router with 2x Satellites- they didn't have that choice in the menu so I picked the closest model). With my Xfinity modem/router, I had some initial issues accessing my company's VPN, but once I resolved those issues, it was very stable.
Once we changed to Orbi, it worked great for a few days and then I had significant issues accessing the company server via the VPN. I'll spare the details other than to say I have been fighting this issue for months (the only thing that worked reliably was connecting my iphone to Orbi's wifi and then connecting my laptop to the phone's hotspot. Believe it or not, that worked every time- it's just a ridiculous workaround). I had our IT consultants remote in and go through the VPN connection twice and neither of them could see anything wrong other than failure to connect to the server.
What I discovered today was the default range of IP addresses the Orbi uses (192.168.1.2/254) overlaps with one of the ranges of addresses used on the company network. Since none of our home devices are set with static IP addresses, they are assigned addresses by the router. With phones and laptops coming and going, not to mention regular rebooting and reconnecting, my computer's IP address would vary over time so my conflicts with devices on the company network would happen on a random basis.
This issue may be obvious to many of you, but many of us using this technology are not network experts (and sometimes issues like this are overlooked by the experts). Hopefully this helps someone else in my same situation. It's hard to appreciate the great features of the Orbi system when you can't earn your paycheck.
Thanks for sharing your experience. You sort of left out how the situation was resolved.
Changed the default DHCP IP range on the Orbi?
Assigned a static IP address to the computer that uses VPN?
or....?
What range of IP addresses did the Xfinity router assign? (192.168.1.x is one of the most common ranges. There are only three "private" IP address ranges).
Would you mind sharing which VPN is being used? (Cisco, OpenVPN, other?)
I am assuming this company is not "large". (Where I used to work, we had a "Class B" IP space of 65,000 IP addresses. Smaller companies that get a single public IP address from their ISP are pretty much forced to use a public IP space behind it.)
Yes, our company is small. We use OpenVPN. I don't know which range of addresses the Xfinity router assigned, but with the Orbi I selected a range of addresses that does not overlap with the ranges used by the company network. While I don't have a static IP address assigned to my laptop, I did reserve an IP address within the Orbi settings. It seems to be working great now.
