1

For the company I am at we have an internal team of 3 including me. So we contract out support for our ERP software. Not my idea. But our contractors are very far away. Far enough for latency to actually be a problem. My boss says I need to fix their issue. I have done everything from my end. I have looked at the firewall, their VPN access, the servers themselves, and everything in between on our network.
I even VPNd to my house, RDPd to one of my servers, then VPNd to the company from my server, then RDPd into the same servers the contractors say they can’t access.
I can’t recreate their issue and I don’t have access to their systems or network. I don’t see how I can do anymore for them. I also don’t like messing with other companies systems because I don’t want to cause any issues.
How would you guys deal with this?

8 Spice ups
2

So is your ERP on prem?

If a VPN and RDP are not working well, would something like an RMM work better for them?

Personally, I would not treat this as a “my” issue or a “their” issue since you don’t have access to their systems and they don’t appear to have very good access to your systems. I would treat this as an “our” issue and do what I can to work with them to resolve this, including asking them if they have any suggestions. I would assume that they have other customers the same distance as your company that they can access without issues.

I would also ask for specifics on what the issue is. Is the RDP failing? The VPN? What is not connecting? Are there any errors? Does it connect and then disconnect?

5 Spice ups
3

Have you spoken with their IT dept to see how they are connecting, what configuration anomalies there may be?

2 Spice ups
4

Its not a VPN or RDP issue. Tested both remotely and local. On hardline and cellphone hotspot. The error is “A secure connection to the server could not be established.” or “This computer can’t connect to remote computer”.
I have users on the other side of the country that have no issue using VPN and connecting to the same servers. We have a foreign company location near the contractors that can even connect to VPN and talk to the servers.

5 Spice ups
5

I haven’t. I have been scouring my emails trying to find the time this happened last year, cause I remember he fixed it himself.

3 Spice ups
6

We have had issues like this before. We basically use wireshark and other network monitoring tools to prove that it is not our network or our configuration causing the issue. There is nothing we can do to “speed things up” over the public internet nor the providers network. We basically prove it’s out of our hands.

4 Spice ups
7

This was working before and isn’t working again?

I would recommend reaching out to their IT department to work through this. If their IT has resolved this issue before, hopefully he has a record or remembers what steps he took to fix it.

4 Spice ups
8

Could be blocked on their side via FW, ACL, WAF, CDN, or any number of other appliances that control traffic. Sounds like it’s on their end because everyone else has no problems reaching it.

3 Spice ups
9

It was working fine Friday. and a ton of other people have no issues. I have tried to ask him if he remembers what he did last year but he has no recollection. So i am going through emails one by one.

3 Spice ups
10

Did you check with their IT and see if they have run any updates or configuration settings over the weekend? My first thought is that something has been changed to cause this if it was working last week and suddenly stopped working over the weekend.

2 Spice ups
11

Sounds to me like they made a change on their end and are just being lazy trying to pin it on you. Put them to work.

3 Spice ups
12

Quick thought - have you tried testing access from a non-work computer? I vaguely recall this is a certificate issue so confirm that non-work machines are able to connect. Maybe they can’t accept a certificate on their machines?

13

Have you confirmed it isn’t something simple like time drift on the contractor’s clock? Also, it might be worth seeing if the contractor can test with a non-Microsoft RDP client, like mRemoteNG.

14

Hold payments and inform both side management that payment will be held or even forfeited then let management handle it ?

15

I have had some similar issues with distant contractors, and when I have been able to find issues with their side, it shows up really quick with a tracert to their IP address. We have to prove ourselves innocent to the boss, and in one recent case, it was an African wired ISP causing issues for the employee. In that case, he activated the hotspot on his phone and changed to the mobile ISP the RDP issues disappeared, and I could show the vastly different tracert results. While “he needs to get a better ISP” wasn’t a wrong answer, it still was not received well.

2 Spice ups