Information Technology Services

Intermittent Student VPN Issues

Outage category: VPN

Location: All Mason students including remote users

Status: Closed

Resolved Alert:

Initial Symptoms

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

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.