Why does reconnect fail continuously - Free VPN Service Provider

Freonpsandoz

My connection to a commercial VPN drops frequently (average connect time is around 12 hours.) I suspect that my ISP is killing the connection deliberately, but don't know how I would determine this for sure. The real problem, however, is that OpenVPN never reconnects. It displays the following message when the connection is lost:

Sat Feb 06 14:44:54 2016 [shadeyou.com] Inactivity timeout (--ping-restart), restarting

It then displays the following set of messages forever, until I discover that the connection is down:

Sat Feb 06 14:44:54 2016 SIGUSR1[soft,ping-restart] received, process restarting
Sat Feb 06 14:44:54 2016 MANAGEMENT: >STATE:1454798694,RECONNECTING,ping-restart,,
Sat Feb 06 14:44:54 2016 Restart pause, 2 second(s)
Sat Feb 06 14:44:56 2016 Socket Buffers: R=[8192->8192] S=[8192->8192]
Sat Feb 06 14:44:56 2016 UDPv4 link local: [undef]
Sat Feb 06 14:44:56 2016 UDPv4 link remote: [AF_INET]5.45.72.83:25000
Sat Feb 06 14:44:56 2016 MANAGEMENT: >STATE:1454798696,WAIT,,,
Sat Feb 06 14:45:57 2016 TLS Error: TLS key negotiation failed to occur within 60 seconds (check your network connectivity)
Sat Feb 06 14:45:57 2016 TLS Error: TLS handshake failed

When I discover the problem, the Internet connection is working properly. I can manually disconnect from the server that OpenVPN is attempting to reconnect to and reconnect in the OpenVPN GUI, but the automatic reconnect attempts will continue to fail forever. What needs to be done by the client and/or the server so that the automatic reconnect succeeds? I have asked my VPN provider (ShadeYou) for help with this problem, and they haven't been able to help me. They say only "Tell us please in which country you are? Such problems usually occur for users of China." (I am in the US.)

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Freonpsandoz

Update: The support team at ShadeYou VPN now says:

Error "TLS Error: TLS key negotiation failed" can only occur when traffic is blocked.
This problem can occur due to errors in the router, NAT rules are configured incorrectly on your computer, a router or a network hardware of your Internet provider.

If the problem occurs only on UDP port 25000, then try to connect via port UDP-53.

My response was:

I will try it, but I don't think what you are saying can possibly be true. The error keeps happening indefinitely, but only with OpenVPN's automatic reconnect. When I use the OpenVPN GUI to manually select the server that OpenVPN is trying to connect to, select disconnect, then select the same server and select connect, it connects every time. If there were a problem with the router, NAT or ISP hardware, wouldn't I also have difficulty connecting manually through the OpenVPN GUI? This has to be some problem that only affects the automatic reconnect.

Am I correct that a problem with the router, NAT or ISP hardware would also affect my ability to connect manually?

Thanks.

Traffic

Is this a Free shadeyou account that you are using ?

janjons

Hi
I get the same problem running latest version of openVpn on latest version on openWrt for a router called TP-LINK 710N
Somehow openvpn does not restore router, so it tries to resolve dns and also connect true it self (the vpn tunnel) insted of properly restart

Tried to resove the problem by setting a ping-exti and setting ping-restart to 0, but it ignores both and loops exacly like the report her says.

Any solution to this would be grate, my config:

config openvpn 'myvpn'
option enabled '1'
option dev 'tun'
option persist_tun '1'
option persist_key '1'
option proto 'udp'
option comp_lzo 'yes'
option verb '3'
option tun-ipv6
option log '/tmp/openvpn.log'
option status '/tmp/openvpn-status.log'
option ca '/etc/openvpn/ca.crt'
option client '1'
option resolv_retry 'infinite'
option nobind '1'
option cipher 'AES-256-CBC'
option cert '/etc/openvpn/client.crt'
option key '/etc/openvpn/client.key'
option ns_cert_type 'server'
option script_security '2 system'
option up '/etc/openvpn/vpn.up'
option down '/etc/openvpn/vpn.down'
option remote 'se.mullvad.net 1300'
option tls-cipher 'TLS-DHE-RSA-WITH-AES-256-CBC-SHA:TLS-DHE-RSA-WITH-CAMELLIA-256-CBC-SHA:TLS-DHE-RSA-WITH-3DES-EDE-CBC-SHA:TLS-DHE-RSA-WITH-AES-128-CBC-SHA:TLS-DHE-RSA-WITH-SEED-CBC-SHA:TLS-DHE-RSA-WITH-CAMELLIA-128-CBC-SHA'