I can only "see" about half of the computer VPN?

I have 2 Balance 20 Routers one for each of our offices and I linked the 2 network by PepVPN. But I can only see about half of the computers in the other building?? I can see all the printers and all the VoIP phones just fine. Where I go wrong??

Thanks in advance,
Mike

Define “see”. Are you running a lan scanner in building 1 and not seeing all computers in building 2? Or, are you looking at the client list in the router in building 2 and its not seeing all the computers in building 2.

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Michael, thank you for replying so quickly.
I was using an ip scanner. And some of the computers would not show up on the list. They also don’t show up when I attempt to map a network drive. But I think I have solved some of that problem because a few of the PCS were set to public network instead of private. But since I have two subnets one for each router in building 1 (192.168.10.—) and building 2 (192.168.20.—), I would like to be able to get name resolution across those two subnets so that building 1 can see all of building 2 computers by name. Maybe bridge the two subnets?

Michael, also just after I setup the PepVPN, the router in building 1 became VERY slow to respond in the web interface?? I’ve reset the router and up loaded the setting from a backup (I made two days ago) It seemed to work fine while plugged into a single computer but as soon as I attach it to the network in its old job it became extremely slow and then eventually wan 1 became unavailable and the network came down. Have since taken it out of service and put in a backup but do you have any ideas?

Were you running the IP scanner at the location with the missing PCs or at the other location? If the same location, then clearly not a Peplink issue. Windows networking hard enough on a single subnet. I gave up long ago and use nothing but IP addresses. Never names. Life is too short to fight with Windows all the time.

As for the slow router, this does not come as a surprise. The Balance 20 is “challenged” on firmware version 8. Search this Forum for more on that. For example

Perhaps fall back to firmware 7? Is there a feature in version 8 that you really care about?

Any VPN has to be a non-trivial cpu load on the router and the Balance 20 may not be up to the task. You didn’t say which hardware version of the B20 you have.

Wow! That’s disappointing. Do you see a fix for this on the horizon? I will revert back to 7.2 for now but this is a doctor’s office it relies heavily on internet access. Should we have bought a different version of this router? (And yes the naming system with Windows is very unreliable, I agree.) Can the balance 20 handle a PepVPN between two offices with a total of 32 users? I need to know ASAP because there’s only a few days before the second office opens and if I have to change routers now’s the Time .
Do you work for PepLink?

That’s disappointing. Do you see a fix for this on the horizon?

I have no idea. New software very often requires new hardware, as a rule, nothing to do with Peplink, its an industry trend for decades.

I will revert back to 7.2 for now but this is a doctor’s office it relies heavily on internet access.

Nothing wrong with firmware version 7. Unless you need/want a specific feature.

Should we have bought a different version of this router?

Sorry, again, I don’t know. This is the sort of question for a trained reseller. I’m just a user/customer. Did you buy the routers from an authorized reseller?

Can the balance 20 handle a PepVPN between two offices with a total of 32 users?

Again, need a reseller or Peplink opinion. I am not qualified.

First off, there are different hardware versions of the Balance 20. Its only rated for 150Mbps, the slowest model in the Balance line.

And I suppose the real question is what bandwidth you can reasonably expect the VPN to provide in each direction. It will certainly be less than the pipe itself offers. I tested this with a Synology router and the speed via the VPN was far less than without.

VPN throughput for Balance 20 with encryption is 30Mbps. In contrast, the Balance 20x, a new model, has double the VPN throughput, 60Mbps. But, I can’t recommend the Balance 20x because firmware 7 is not supported and I have had too many issues with firmware 8. The Balance One can run firmware 7 and is a step up from the B20, but the VPN throughput is not published.

Are you using a L2 tunnel? (this would include broadcast traffic)

To be honest I don’t know. Where would I look for that?

Thank you Jonathan for participating

Layer2 extends one subnet to multiple locations, which includes broadcast traffic.
Layer3 routes, each location will have it’s own ip range.

See these great articles.

Thank you Jonathan, I gave it a quick read and I think I’m going to deploy it. Looks like that’ll solve one of my problems. My current problem is that as soon as I installed 8.01 firmware upgrade my router started to fail and it appeared to be an overwhelmed processor. I had inadvertently activated the “send all data” option on my WAN1… fortunately I had a backup router I switched to immediately. I then tried to corrected my mistakes, but ever since that incident, this router has become very unreliable. I have reset it and reloaded the configuration, I also reverted back to the firmware that it came with 7.0.2. But still it’ll run for about 20 minutes and then appear to lock up and we lose Internet from WAN1 and if I unplug the cable from my ISP (Comcast) to WAN1, the second ISP input (ATT) takes over and it seems to run very smoothly? SO STANDING HERE WITH MOST OF MY HAIR ON THE FLOOR, I ordered a New Balance 20 and will try the new settings when it arrives. Oh, PS, 4 of the machines that weren’t showing up on the network were set to public network instead of private. That solution was simple.