VPN Back 
Got the VPN back up the other day. It looks like the system got attached to the
Basic Firewall set of filtering rules (and I am completey unable to see how, why, or where) and that seemed to be written in a way which was dumping
everything which was going in or out. So, one rule to explicitly permit lz the ability to do
any protocol (since just permitting TCP, UDP, and protocol 50 failed to work) later, and we have the tunnel back up.
However, the cable modem seems to be celebrating by dumping it's connection every morning. I had to cycle the power yestarday morning and this morning in order to get it to pass packets properly. The VPN survived the outage, amazingly.