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L2TP VPN Issues – Intermittent errors resolved by reboot

I start having this error soon after installing a secure VPN software (Anonymizer Universal). Working from the cottage using an Wi-Fi access points as my internet connection, I got this error a lot and it was driving me crazy.

I noticed that it was happening when the connection was not stable. By that, I mean that I had some latency issues between my antenna and the rest of the network. You can determine the latency “quality” by doing a ping. The ping test will measure the time it takes for a fix quantity of data (a packet) to travel from your PC to the chosen location and back. To find the latency problem I have used the ping test done from PingTest.net. I also used a little software made by IP_Switch named WS_Ping ProPack. While testing, I would get pings as high as 2 seconds! Just to compare, using my cable connection, I get pings of around 10 to 20 ms (milliseconds). The ping time was fluctuating a lot so the VPN connection was dropping a lot, to the point where I would need to reboot my laptop every 5 minutes.

If the VPN tries to “reconnect” to often, you will get an error from Windows as it will be unable to reestablish the VPN connection.

The full error I would get was: “Hardware failure in port or attached device”.

You can fix this by reboot but this reboot solution is more annoying than a real fix.

Since rebooting my laptop every 5 minutes was not an option, I search the web for a better solution to this problem.

I’m glad to tell you that I have found a solution for the error 692. It is a HotFix from Microsoft and it works! After having installed the HotFix, the 692 error is a thing of the past. Sure, I still get deconnected once in a while but now I can simply restart my VPN and it works.

** You can find the Microsoft HotFix using this link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/980399/en-us

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