Things that start with the letter V… and don't play nicely

No this is not about Vista. For the last few months I have been having problems with my Verizon Wirless Broadband card.  It connects, works fine for about 4 minutes then drops the connection.  This happened in various locations, including while stationary so it was not a signal or coverage problem. Friday I finally broke down and called Verzion for support, after software and firmware upgrades the problem remained, and they insisted it had to do with my VPN connection.   The only problem with that theory was I was not connected to a VPN at the time.  They finally opened a “trouble ticket” and assigned it to some other support group who came back and said it was disconnection due to a “bad IP Source” and the problem is on my laptop I should contact my IT support (which if you are me basically means look in the mirror). A few Google searches revealed many others experiencing similar issues but not solutions.  To attempt to solve the problem I started disabling various services on my laptop.  First I tried the Firewall, that wan’t it.  I switched off my Wireless, disabled my Wired Connections, not them either.  Finally I disabled the Network Adapters installed with VMware Workstation…… BINGO my connection lasted for 2+ hours on the Acela from New York to Boston. A picture named M2 Verizon Wireless and VMWare apparently do not play nicely together

2 Responses to Things that start with the letter V… and don't play nicely
  1. Carl Tyler
    March 30, 2009 | 12:51 pm

    Did you try changing their order of priority?

  2. null
    April 7, 2009 | 11:34 pm

    Whether specific to your scenario or not, something that is all too common is due to the Bonjour service and mDNSResponder.exe. “A few” people might have it via iTunes, and we hear a couple people in the world use iTunes. Emoticon Very frequent occurence with Juniper SSL VPNs and others with connections being dropped quickly. Disable service or can the process and everything is fine.