OpenVPN repeatedly losing connections with inactivity timeout | David R. MacIver

OpenVPN repeatedly losing connections with inactivity timeout | David R. MacIver

OpenVPN repeatedly losing connections with inactivity timeout

openvpn inactive time out error

I’ve been seeing bizarre problems with my openvpn client (on linux) over the last couple of days. It would connect, and I could access the network, but the VPN would regularly restart itself and connections would be closed, seeing messages like

Tue May 22 13:19:43 2012 [OpenVPN_Server] Inactivity timeout (--ping-restart), restarting
Tue May 22 13:19:43 2012 TCP/UDP: Closing socket

I saw these problems when I tried my profile on several different computers.

I was unable to find anything on the internet about this (possibly my google fu was weak), but we’ve finally managed to track down the problem. I thought I’d put this here in case other people had the same issue.

This seems to happen when you’re running two openvpn clients with the same profile from different computers. I have two computers I use, and I’d left one idle running the VPN client. When I then tried to connect to the VPN from the other computer I would see this behaviour. I then (foolishly) left that computer trying to use the VPN when I went back to the first computer, so now the problem had mysteriously appeared there too.

Anyway, now that I know the issue it’s easy to avoid. Live and learn.