Complete WiFi and VPN

[mispeltyuoth]

Like many I am working from home at the moment and have converted a spare bedroom to a home office. My work laptop uses a VPN to enable me to connect securely to an internal network where our servers reside. The laptop doesn't have an ethernet port so is totally dependent on wifi and it currently connects on the 5 GHz band of my SH2. Everything was working fine until about a week ago when I regularly started losing the connection through the VPN. There seemed to be 2 reasons for this

1.  a weak signal in my home office; and
2. the hub disconnecting the VPN.

I resolved the latter by turning on port clamping and thought, I know, I'll use my Complete WiFi (black) disc to boost the signal in the room. I set up the disc per the instructions but am unable to connect through the VPN while the disc is on. If I switch the disc off (and restart the router) I can access the VPN. My two home PC's, a tablet and 2 phones all seem to connect OK using the disc (or at least, as I have a wifi connection, I assume it's through the disc).

So, some questions

1. Does the disc work on the 5GHz band?
2. Is there some special set up I need to do to access the VPN?
3. How do I know if I'm connecting through the disc rather than directly to the router?

Oddly enough, the disc doesn't show up in the 'Wifi disc devices' in SH2 Manager - it's in the 5GHz devices (which may answer 1 above).

Thanks in advance for any help

[Les-Gibson]

VPN shouldn't make any difference.

Check that Smart setup is off What is Smart Setup on the BT Hub? How can I turn it on and off? | BT Help

And then make sure that your router is operating in Wireless Mode 1. There was a software update recently that put some peoples routers into Mode 2 and stopped the discs from working.

Enter 192.168.1.254 into the address bar of a browser, click Advanced and then wireless

[CloudGamer]

You could add ethernet to your laptop by using an ethernet usb dongle or usb multi media hub.

For example: https://www.belkin.com/uk/adapters/c/ethernet/

https://shop.bt.com/products/microsoft-usb-ethernet-adapter-ejs-00004-D3P3.html

https://shop.bt.com/products/startech-com-usb-3-0-to-gigabit-ethernet-nic-network-adapter-usb31000s-...

Alternatively some suggestions for helping resolve the wifi questions 1&2; On BT Hub web gui check in wifi settings for "separate bands" option and set different password for 5 Ghz.   Doing this will make it obvious what your devices are connecting to by SSID name and by password used as well as show band being used when checking network connections/map settings on both devices and in web gui network map page for BT Hub

For wifi question 3; Try using tracert or winmrt to ping any external server to confirm if the IP address shown in Network Map on BT Hub web gui for wifi disc is used in any of the first two or three hops, if it is not obvious in Network Map what devices are connected to disc and which are connected directly to BT Hub.

[Les-Gibson]

@mispeltyuoth 

Couldn't you just ask your employer for a docking station for your laptop? that will give you access to ethernet among other ports