Hi,
I’m having problems with remote desktop connections to my machines via ZeroTier VPN. These machines are in two different countries, and when I try to connect via VPN, it disconnects frequently.
I chose ZeroTier for its ease of configuration. In the past, I used OpenVPN for this type of use and never encountered such incidents. However, since switching to ZeroTier, the connection drops very often (at least 1 or 2 times per hour).
I don’t know if I’m missing something. I have installed the “ZeroTier One” software on my Windows machine, joined my network, and finally authorized it via the webpage.
If I’m missing anything, please let me know.
Every time the Remote Desktop reaches 5 attempts to reconnect, my connection is completely lost, I log in and it gets stuck with the wait message on black screen
I have to enter ZeroTier Central*** and refresh my network to be able to reconnect.
I can’t get more than 20 minutes without disconnecting, my connection speeds are 45 local and 300 mb/s remote.
I am currently thinking that the issue might be ZeroTier related instead and it leads to fairly regular drops in the ZeroTier traffic that causes issues with my RDP connections to machines that are only a few feet away.
I don’t recall this being an issue in years past, such as throughout 2022 and before then, but starting sometime I think in 2023 it is now a regular occurrence with these local RDP connections occurring over a ZeroTier connection.
To further add to my comments above, it definitely feels like ZeroTier is losing its connectivity for long enough that it disrupts the RDP connections long enough that the connection isn’t able to automatically reconnect.
I left connections to the local machines I’m RDP’ing into for the last week and the one I’m connected to via the local network IP hasn’t had any issues whatsoever whereas each time I remember to check on the computer where I’ve RDP’ed via the ZeroTier IP it has reached a point where it has disconnected and Net Uptime Monitor reports no issues connectivity-wise for that machine so the only reasonable explanation would seem to be something on the ZeroTier side of things.
All of the clients involved are on the current latest 1.14.0 release as well.
It has been both consistent and fairly frustrating behavior to observe and I guess finally tie to ZeroTier in this case as previously I had assumed it was something to do with the machines / network on my end since I’d typically had a very good experience with ZeroTier.
While I could use the local network IPs in this case, if let’s say the machines were located close by but not directly within my internal network and I didn’t want to use a regular VPN to bridge the networks I would be much more reliant on the ZeroTier connectivity being stable to provide the needed access to the remote machines but under these conditions I would likely run into multiple RDP connection issues throughout each day.
Additionally, I went ahead and tried out this suggestion as well:
Which I had used previously maybe around 2020 or so to force the TCP-only mode for the RDP connections.
However it doesn’t appear to be a solution here as the RDP disconnections have still occurred for a machine that was connected using the TCP-only mode overnight and already a second time again this morning after reconnecting one more time.
Emphasis here is that the computers involved are on my local network and the network is running reliably with no other signs of network connectivity issues on the machines involved or the local network continuing to see this behavior observed from ZeroTier is understandably frustrating.
Maybe next I can try and find a tool that can monitor the ZeroTier network adapters more closely and keep track of connectivity between the two machines that way to try and observe if there are any patterns but so far the length of time between disconnects tends to vary with some situations occurring within minutes, as happened earlier this morning, or hours.
Hello, I have exactly the same problem, it keeps disconnecting, it is a problem with the users and it is difficult to give them an explanation and solution.
As a backup I am using Tailscale, it really works well, and has several quite interesting things such as automatic client updating among others.
I really like Zerotier, but with the change in pricing policy and these constant disconnections I think I will change the entire infrastructure towards tailscale. a difficult decision since it involves a lot of reconfiguration work.