How to make OpenVPN client restart when the link goes down?
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Quite a few times folks on my network complain that the internet is down. When I check pfSense I see that the OpenVPN gateway is offline. Sometimes, I go to the OpenVPN client monitor and it shows that the link is "down". Other times, it shows that the link is "up", but the gateway is still showing offline with 100% packet loss.
In these conditions, a simple restart of the OpenVPN client fixes the problem. Can this be automated? If the gateway is showing 100% packet loss or offline, or OpenVPN client is down, is there a way to automatically restart OpenVPN client? Is this something that I always have to do manually?
Thanks.
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The client should detect the loss of link and continuously retry until reconnected.
The only situation I know of that might actually kill the client process is if it receives an authentication failure instead of some transient inability to connect. That is a hard error to OpenVPN and the process exits.
If you do not desire this behavior try adding this to the advanced, custom options in the client:
auth-retry nointeract;
An alternative is leaving it as is and adding that OpenVPN client process to Services > Service Watchdog
The OpenVPN log should contain more information about what is actually happening in your case.
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There is nothing odd in the log when this happens. I bumped up the logging level to 4 to see if I can spot anything the next time this occurs. I just see that always the "gateway" is offline, and the OpenVPN client is either up or down. When it's up, it appears to be "brain dead" so no traffic is going on it. The client is down, but the process is still running. I know that the process is running because if I manually stop the process, the status changes to "Is the process running?".
Most likely something funky on the VPN Provider's side. But I am not sure how to automatically recover. Manual restart of the client works every time.
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If the client is getting proper responses to the keepalive pings I am not sure what to do either, other than change providers.
