StifleR VPN-Connected Clients

VPN Subnets are treated differently from regular subnets. A new VPN Subnet will be created if a Client connects via VPN connection, and the subnet will be tagged as VPN in WMI on the StifleR Server (VPN=1).

If the StifleR agent detects that the system is connected via a corporate VPN connection, the client will take the configuration settings for the subnet (as configured on the server) and set:

o TargetBandwidth value / number of active clients.

This is updated every 15mins.

For example. If the VPN Subnet is configured with a TargetBandwidth value of 102400 (100Mbs), and there are 5 clients connected via VPN, they will each receive 5/100Mbs – so 20Mbs

This is recalculated every 15 minutes so as clients connect/disconnect via VPN the bandwidth is shared proportionately.

Note: VPN Clients on a VPN subnet are never selected to be a ‘Red Leader’ as that is not required for VPN clients.

Manual VPN Detection:

Some older versions of VPN Client software can be hard to detect, so we provide a method for you to manually define certain strings within the VPN Connection ‘Description’ property that the StifleR client will search for.

If you want to use this method, you must first determine the VPN String used within the connection. You can get this by running IPConfig /All on a client that is connected via VPN.

Here is an example output.

PPP adapter 2Pint AlwaysOn VPN:

   Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . : 2pintsoftware.com

   Description . . . . . . . . . . . : 2Pint AlwaysOn VPN <<< this is the VPNString

   Physical Address. . . . . . . . . :

   DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : No

   Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes

   IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 172.22.136.52(Preferred)

   Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.255

   Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 0.0.0.0

   DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 172.30.1.10

                                       172.30.1.11

   NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled

Once you have the Description from the connection, you must configure the StifleR Client to search for this specific string – and this is done via the configuration file on the client.

The following key must be added to the StifleR.ClientApp.exe.Config XML configuration file which is located in the StifleR Client installation folder.

In the above example the StifleR Client will search for two types of VPN connection, using the strings defined.

2Pint AlwaysOn VPN

CISCO AnyConnect

Please note that there must be no leading or trailing spaces in the strings, and they must be comma separated

The Strings are also case sensitive!

If either of these strings are found within the connection properties on a StifleR client it will be treated as a VPN Client.

You can add this XML Key using PowerShell as shown in the following example.

$path = "$ENV:ProgramFiles\2Pint Software\StifleR Client\StifleR.ClientApp.exe.config"

$xml = [xml](Get-Content $path)

$node1 = $xml.Configuration.appsettings.add | where {$_.key -eq "VPNStrings"}

$node1.Value = "2Pint AlwaysOn VPN,CISCO AnyConnect"

$xml.Save($Path)