I'm trying to troubleshoot VPN dropouts over a Telstra NextG gateway (NextG Modem + Wireless Router in one).

VPN is dropping out after 5 minutes or so, but I need to investigate whether its caused by our VPN in some way, or by the Telstra connection dropping out.

Anyone have any tools that will say - run a ping every 5 seconds and log the results to a text file?

write a perl script to do it?

You're the only person in the world who writes perl.

Wireshark. Look for control packets. Is it PPTP/L2TP? What is the delivery mechanism.

not sure how pinging every 5 seconds will help you resolve that issue - but even a dos batch file can ping a host, redirect the output to a file and then sleep 5 seconds

I won't pretend to be an expert on VPN, so here is what I can show you.

http://www.mongie.com/ulimages/bwy1235104834t.JPG

Ah. IPsec. Not sure. try this?

I may not have phrased the question properly...

I've got logging from the VPN client showing that keepalive packets stop being replied to after a while, and the client kills the connection.

What I want to know is, is the issue caused by the Net connection, or VPN in some way.

So, I want to test to see if the net connection is dropping out for a short period of time, by running a regular ping, and hoping that after about 5 minutes, the ping doesn't get a reply - thus the connection has dropped out (I want to do this completely separate from VPN).

Does the VPN software have an activity monitor similar to FTP programs that will just boot you off if it detecs you've gone idle?