Reconnection parameters

cjs94

Hi all,

I had a problem with a remote site that failed to establish a connection due to a TLS certificate error. That problem is thankfully now resolved, but what is more concerning is the behaviour of the site during the failure: it continued trying to establish a connection every two seconds, only to fail time and time again due to the same certificate error and there was nothing at all I could do about it. This is particularly serious because it is a mobile connection, and this caused it to chew through its data allowance in short order and cost me quite a bit in overuse fees.

Is there any way at all to control the reconnection parameters when the tunnel drops, or fails to establish? I see in the config a couple of likely parameters, but these are specifically for TCP tunnels -- I'm using UDP. I have no problem with the principle of reconnection, in fact I want it to continue trying, just in a more responsible way.

Thanks in advance,
Chris

TinCanTech

Your best options are probably

--connect-retry n [max]
Wait n seconds between connection attempts (default=5). Repeated reconnection attempts are slowed down after 5 retries per remote by doubling the wait time after each unsuccessful attempt. The optional argument max specifies the maximum value of wait time in seconds at which it gets capped (default=300).
--connect-retry-max n
n specifies the number of times each --remote or <connection> entry is tried. Specifying n as one would try each entry exactly once. A successful connection resets the counter. (default=unlimited).

https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/Openvpn24ManPage

cjs94

Thanks for the reply. I did see those options, but in my version of OpenVPN (2.1) they are listed in the man page as applicable to --proto tcp-client only. Is this incorrect, or did it change in a more recent version?

TinCanTech

We don't support version 2.1