Hi, I just joined this community and hope to one day be of help to someone in my area of expertise, but for now I need some assistance with a problem outside of my area.
I work for a local hospital, and we have a VPN tunnel between us and another hospital. We have a full T1 line connected to the PIX 501. The problem is that I can establish the tunnel and send data, but at random times the traffic flow stops. When this happens, the tunnel is still up but no data can flow through. If I reboot the PIX, the data flow starts back up. I have noticed this happens more often when a large amount of data is being passed through. The data we are sending through this tunnel is X-Ray image files which are quite large. When these files are being sent, on the Home tab in the Pix Device Manager shows anywhere from 1300 to over 1600 Kbps of traffic on the inside and outside interfaces. The CPU usage jumps from less than 10% to around 70%. The strange thing is that the pattern is not consistent, sometimes I can send 3 to 4 of the large image files back to back with no problems before the traffic stops and I have to reboot the PIX.
I have run continuos pings on the tunnel during heavy traffic and no traffic. During heavy use i show high response times (300-600ms) and multiple Request Time out errors until finally all I receive is Request Time out errors. During a test of no traffic on the Tunnel other than pinging continuosly I show good response times (30-50ms) but I still receive random Request Time out errors and eventually all I receive is Request time out. The traffic flow stays up much longer with no traffic. As I stated earlier the Tunnel itself never seems to go down, just the flow of data since in the PDM the tunnel state always shows as IDLE.
Could the problem be the PIX cannot handle the load ( as a side note, when the tunnel traffic stops the T1 is still functional as all other traffic [-internet-] still works. ) or is my ISP killing the traffic since it is so large? Any insight would be appreciated and I can provide more detailed info if needed. Thank You.
Also I need to add that I have another VPN tunnel configured on this PIX that never has any problems. It is connected to a different location and it transmits a small amount of data only twice a day. The rest of the time there is no traffic, but it never fails.
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