Client Connectivity Issues (Formerly known as Direct Access issues) Parent ticket 1076157

UPDATE 15:00 (22/03/2024)

Despite extensive testing and investigation by experts in NUIT and with our external partners Microsoft, Huawei, Dell and Juniper, no single factor has been identified as a primary cause of this issue.

Therefore, efforts will now be re-directed towards identifying a replacement for Direct Access rather than finding a legacy solution to this issue. The University’s Remote Access Group are currently working on identifying this new remote access solution suitable for University-wide deployment.

In the interim, we continue to recommend that colleagues use Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) or Remote Desktop when working remotely, or to work from campus to minimise any impact of remote connectivity issues.

In addition to the workarounds listed above, we are also proposing changes to SAP and offline file timeouts, both of which have proven to mitigate connectivity issues with test user groups in the past.

We apologise for the inconvenience that the continued connectivity issues have caused, and will post news of any new remote access solution as soon as we have it.

UPDATE 16:00 (08/03/2024)

Investigations into this issue are ongoing with our external partners.

Workarounds are detailed below.

A further update will be provided here by 16:00 on 22nd March 2024

UPDATE – 11:00 (23/02/2024)

Our investigations into this issue are ongoing with our technical teams continuing to work hard to trace the source of this problem and identify a solution.

We are continuing to work with Microsoft engineers to test Direct Access logs to help rule out further causes of the issue.

Alongside this work to identify the root cause of the issue, we have also begun testing a new alternative to Direct Access. If testing is successful, we will look to roll this out on a trial basis to specific units heavily affected by this issue.

A scheduled update on this work will be provided here at 16:00 on 8th March 2024.

Any significant developments prior to this date will also be posted here.

UPDATE - 16:00 (02/02/2024)

We are continuing to collaborate with Microsoft engineers as part of our planned schedule of investigation and analysis.

In addition, we are working with Huawei as we continue to test and trace the network.

We anticipate an extended period of testing and a further update will be provided at 16:00 on 23rd February 2024.

Any significant developments prior to this date will also be posted here.

UPDATE - 16:00 (26/01/2024)

Our investigations regarding this issue are ongoing, with a particular focus on testing and tracing the network.

In addition, we are collaborating with Microsoft engineers as part of our planned schedule of investigation and analysis.

A further update will be provided at 16:00 on 2nd February 2024.

UPDATE - 16:00 (19/01/2024)

Following system disruptions on 9th and 19th January, the number of reported client connectivity issues has increased.

Our continued investigation into these disruptions has enabled our technical teams to narrow the focus of their troubleshooting to network errors and reconnections.

A planned schedule of investigation and analysis is ongoing to resolve this issue.

A further update will be provided at 16:00 on 26th January 2024.

UPDATE - 10:00 (12/01/2024)

As the tests have returned positive results, we are now rolling the potential mitigation out to a wider audience. Once this has taken place, we will await feedback from collleagues to learn whether the improved experience is also seen by the extended group and then, if this is the case, we plan to be in a position to deploy the mitigation to all affected users.

A further update will be provided at 16:00 on 19th January 2024.

UPDATE - 15:00 (21/12/2023)

Our extended testing continues and early signs are that the results are promising.

We apologise for any inconvenience and appreciate your continued understanding and patience. In the meantime, we recommend that you follow the troubleshooting here if you are affected, as per our earlier update (17:00 08/11).

We will continue to work with the testing group and a further update will be provided at 16:00 on the 8th January 2024.

UPDATE - 14:30 (15/12/2023)

We have made a configuration amendment to a subset of devices and are working with selected colleagues internally to understand the impact of that amendment

UPDATE - 09:00 (14/12/2023)

Our investigations, testing and analysis continue.

We are now focussing on specific connectivity thresholds and are widenning our user testing to produce more data. This will assist in confirming if we have identifed the root cause of the repeating connectivity issues.

A further update will be issued here at 16:00 on 21st December

UPDATE - 08:00 (7/12/2023)

Work continues to identify the root cause however nothing new to report as of 8 am this morning.

A further update will be issued here at 9 am on 14th December

UPDATE - 08:00 (30/11/2023)

We have identified certain differences in behaviour relating to Direct Access on devices with different operating system builds which we are investigating further. As this work progresses and provides confirmed information, we'll post the updates here.

A further update will be issued here at 16:00 hrs on 06/12/2023

UPDATE - 16:30 (23/11)

We have assigned a dedicated team to continue working daily on both the investigation and resolution of this intermittent but recurring issue.

A further update will be issued here at 16:00 hrs on 29/11/2023

UPDATE - 16:00 (16/11)

We are still working hard to resolve this incident as a matter of urgency and will continue to keep you informed of our progress. We have widened our testing to other affected colleagues, and we are analysing the results.

A further update will be issued here at 16:00 hrs on 22/11/2023

UPDATE - 16:00 (14/11)

We are still working hard to resolve this incident as a matter of urgency and will continue to keep you informed of our progress. We’ve had some positive results from our testing with affected colleagues so far and we continue to work through the test plan.

Direct Access appears to be disconnecting and reconnecting several times during the course of the working day. The Direct Access disconnection is what is ending remote SAP sessions and in other cases putting devices into “Work Offline” mode meaning department shared drives become unavailable.

Direct Access may reconnect successfully without any manual actions but in many cases, this doesn’t seem to be reverting devices back to Work Online mode and shares remain offline.

We apologise for any inconvenience and appreciate your continued understanding and patience. In the meantime, we recommend that you follow the guidance provided on the previous update (17:00 08/11).

A further update will be issued here at 16:00 hrs on 16/11/2023.

Update 16:00 (10/11)

We are continuing to investigate this issue and are working hard to resolve it as a matter of urgency. We will keep you informed of our progress.

We apologise for any inconvenience and appreciate your continued understanding and patience. In the meantime, we recommend that you follow the guidance provided on the previous update (17:00 08/11).

An update will be issued here on Tuesday 14th November at 16:00.

Update 17:00 (08/11):

Following a period of investigation with our technical teams and a group of selected users, we have been able to confirm that Direct Access connectivity is dropping and reconnecting intermittently for users who are working remotely.

This is impacting users who are regularly accessing shared drives and working in SAP whilst off campus.

Users may experience the following:

SAP sessions disconnecting with a 'Connection reset by peer' message

Shared drive contents (files and folders) not being visible/accessible

Please see the troubleshooting here if you are affected by either of these issues.

We apologise for any inconvenience and appreciate your continued understanding and patience.

We are continuing to work with selected affected users to further investigate and resolve these issues.

A further update will be provided here by 16:00 Friday 10th November

Update 17:00 (06/11):

We have received a number of reports from colleagues of issues relating to loss of Direct Access connectivity, which began on Thursday 2nd November. This may be affecting access to shared filestore and causing SAP disconnection errors intermittently.

Our technical teams have checked their system monitoring and can see that Direct Access is working as expected for the majority of users. In most cases, Direct Access automatically reconnects; if you find that it has not reconnected automatically, please attempt a full shutdown and restart of your laptop. Once restarted, you can confirm that Direct Access has reconnected before entering your login credentials, by clicking the WiFi / Network icon at the bottom right of the login page. Please note; Direct Access (shown as NCL DA CL1 in the network list) can take up to 30 seconds to reconnect at this stage:

We are working with some affected users to further troubleshoot these issues to identify the underlying cause.

We apologise for any inconvenience and appreciate your continued understanding and patience. We will continue to keep you informed of any updates.

Original message:

Regards the continued issues we are experiencing with Direct Access when working from home.

Our teams are still working on the cause. Once we have an update, we will publish it here.

published on: 3 November 2023

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