Subject: ISDN routers, VPN and staying alive pings - work done?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1998 11:12:46 +0100

Today most ISDN routers are capable of keeping a connection alive at both
ends, when the ISDN connection terminate. TCP (mostly), UDP (sometimes)
and IPX is spoofed in the local router, not sending staying alive messages
over the ISDN link.

When running a VPN connection over Internet through a ISP ISDN, specially
a encrypted one, this is not the case, the messages wake up the connection.
If a site need to connect to places with VPN and need to go over a ISP ISDN
connection, this can be rather problematic mainly from a economical point
of
view.

My questions, after scanning the RFC's, are two :

a. has any standard group looked into this or is this just a router
manufacture
     problem.

b. VPN is just mentioned as secondaries in two of the RFC's, although most
    VPN makers is or will implement IPSec as encryption tool for their
products.
    Has work into a RFC for VPN been discussed or is it on line allready?

Regards,

Lars Magnusson
IS-manager/Internet Infrastructure
Saab Automobile AB, Sweden

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1998 15:49:04 +0100

>At 11:12 24.11.98 +0100, [email-masked] wrote:
>>
.....
><Soapbox>
....
:-) I don't protest, leaves that to the vendor :-)
....
></soapbox>

>The RIGHT solution is to stop sending keepalives.
....
>In a VPN constructed of encrypted tunnels, the slightly less evil
>(only squared :-) solution is to make the border routers do the spoofing;
>since these boxes will often be of the same kind used for ISDN
termination,
>the code "should be there", but you might need to lean more than slightly
>on the vendor to make him call the right code at the right point.

I must admit that the vendor in this case do look into the problem. If they
can solve it is a future issue.

But we have a number of VPN solutions and VPN (also increasingly over ISDN)
will be, if not already
is, a interconnectivity issue. Some of the crypto parts is covered by the
IPSec standard, but the comm,
what about that. As I said I couldn't find anything substantial about these
functions as a user I would like
to see a standard that gave me possibility of intermingle products and also
allow running them over
a, so dead ;-), function as ISDN and that also can survive into an
XDSL-enviroment.

Regards,
Lars M
Internet Infrastructure
Saab Automobile

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1998 15:49:04 +0100

.....
....

....
termination,

Regards,
Lars M
Internet Infrastructure
Saab Automobile