I work for the Dept of Air Force. We are pushing to do telework. My problem is I live way out in the country were the only way we can get high speed interent to access citrix is through hughesnet satellite. I have tried multiple times to acccess CITRIX and even VPN from the laptop at home but it doesn't work. Citrix takes forever just to come up if it comes up at all. The best the IT folks at the office can think of is that there may be a latency issue that they don't know how to fix. I'm thinking it may have to do with the way the laptops are set-up. What questions should the IT people be looking at to make it work? Why wouldn't CITRIX work at all with high speed internet just because it is coming through the satellite? VPN keeps saying fail to connect to TCP or connection terminated by local client. I can access both VPN and CITRIX if I'm using regular highspeed internet in the city.

Have you considered contacting AT&T or Citrix for assistance.

Also, you may want to look into an AT&T NIC for connection.

What is a NIC? I've sent an email to CITRIX but so far have not received a response. I have also requested the IT folks contact them since that's probably who should be doing so. My IT folks haven't said whether they have or would. I'm also trying to get answers from HughesNet - but getting an English speaking person who knows what we are talking about has been difficult.

W -

Sorry for the delay in responding, we are still un-packing.

A "NIC" stands for "Netrork Interface Card". It is installed in a computer and it provides the Ethernet connection to the WAN (Wide Area Network".

What I actually meant is a plug in wireless modem that dials a pre-set number and links you directly to a network.

Call AT&T describe the lack of network facilities and see if their wireless connection solution will work for you. Verizon and Sprint are also big players for this piece of the market.

Satellite internet has a much higher latency time than most internet connections- meaning the time it takes you computer, up through the satellite, back down to the Hughes network operation center, then out to the internet. It's an inherent issue with satellite, in that the data has to travel several miles up to a satellite and back down before getting to the internet, unlike say cable internet, where it would go to a local headend, and then straight to the cable providers backbone.

Have you tested your computer with a different form of high speed internet, or did you test it with a different computer? Testing it with yours would really be the only way to eliminate your computer itself as the cause- you could be using a firewall or other software that would block citrix from connecting. But if it turns out to be your internet connection, a verizon aircard might be the way to go... I think it's actually about the same price as hughesnet.

Here is a blurb that I found:

High Speed Internet (http://www.usdirect.com/hughesnet/faq.php)

It basically states that MOST VPN clients will work. I think it also states you need the 6000 modem. Throughput speeds are reduced considerably. Like 75%.

It's possible to possibly tweak some settings under Windows in the registry. Not sure, what, if anything, can work: TCP/IPv4 Configurable Registry Settings (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms884977.aspx)

retsoksirhc:

You might be on to something. Do you have cell service?

There may be a way to channel only the VPN connection through another interface like cellular. You would have 2 connections at the same time. The VPN and the Satellite. VPN packets would take the cellular route.

I tried to get a similar thing to work by protocol, but was unsuccessful. The software makers said it was possible. Having a SM 255.255.255.255 could have been an issue.

I don't have cell service myself, but I've set it up a few times- it's worked with citrix web access for a few clients.

The problem I can think of with running the VPN through a cell service and everything else through the satellite would be routing tables... if the VPn software doesn't support an exclusive interface, you would have to add static routes to all the subnets in the VPN's network, and hope none overlap your home network... which doesn't seem like it would be that great of an idea.

I'd probably go with just cell service. It will almost certainly have better latency, and if I remember correctly from when a friend of mine had satellite, they do a lot more bandwidth throttling if you are a heavy downloader, so you'd be in pretty much the same boat either way in that respect. You can get routers for cell service cards, too.

I really do think latency is the issue with the VPN though. You could try asking the IT guys at your work to see if they can raise the connection timeout limit.