Intermittent Student VPN Issues

October 28, 2020 10:58 a.m.
Outage category: 
VPN
Location: 
All Mason students including remote users
Status: 
Closed
Resolved alert: 
10/25/2020 8:06 pm

Al Mason students including remote users could not login to their Student VPN accounts.

Initial symptoms: 

All Mason students including remote users were unable to login to their Student VPN Accounts.

Duration: 
10/25/2020 4:45 pm - 10/25/2020 8:06 pm
Impact to Mason: 

All Mason students including remote users were unable to login to their Student VPN Accounts.

Affected Services: 
Virtual Private Network (VPN)
ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS
Cause: 

The issues seems to have started at 2:34pm, but Support Center didn’t get calls until 6:19pm, that there were issues with the Student VPN.  Once the Network Engineers were notified, they quickly figured out what the root cause was.  The F5 load balancer route was changed during the Sunday Scheduled Maintenance. This indirectly affected the Student VPN.  The Student VPN in DR was not routed correctly, the one in Fairfax was fine, and that is why some students were able to login to the student VPN.

Resolution: 

Re-routed the Student VPN in DR to point correctly to ISE. Once completed, all Student VPN came back online.

Prevention: 

After making any changes to F5 load balancers, we will ensure that the Student VPN in DR and Fairfax are routed correctly.

STATISTICS