OpenVPN ssh and web interface falls over

[andrewj]

Hi Community,
I have an instance of OpenVPN community running in a windows VM. It has been recently upgraded to the latest release via the web interface.
I was hoping the upgrade would resolve an issue I am having as outlined below which is slowly getting worse

When I restart the VM host (say after the monthly windows patch run) I need to restart the OpenVPN server as the web interface and ssh service become unresponsive after a few hours. The only way to get the ssh and web interface to work again is to restart the OpenVPN server from the VM console.

The VPN server itself allows VPN connections but I have no management control over the box

Lately I have found that the ssh service and the web interface fall over again after a few hours. Sometimes many restarts will resolve the issue, but this is really inconvenient for the users using the service

Has anyone else encountered this behavior

Any assistance will be greatly appreciated

[openvpn_inc]

Hello andrewj,

The description of the problem seems to be related to a mistake in routing. Is this running as an OpenVPN server on the Windows VM? And the web interface and SSH service are on this same Windows VM too? Are there any particular routes you're implementing, any custom things you're doing that could have an impact on routing?

Kind regards,
Johan

[andrewj]

Hello Johan,
The web interface and ssh service are running on the same OpenVPN server and yes its a Windows VM. As I mentioned above the ssh and web interface remain up for several hours after I have rebooted the OpenVPN server and then stop responding, so I dont think routing is at play here. I can still ping the IP address that I use to ssh or https to the ssh or web interfaces respectively even after the services have stopped responding.
Is there a command I can run under option 8 (shell service) that will restart the sshd daemon?

Kind regards
Andrew

[openvpn_inc]

Hello Andrew,

I think I misunderstood you. You said "The only way to get the ssh and web interface to work again is to restart the OpenVPN server from the VM console". When you said "OpenVPN server" here I assumed you were talking about the OpenVPN program that is configured to run as a server. So my assumption was that the ssh and web interfaces stop working but you can get them to work again by stopping/starting the OpenVPN server software. But instead it now looks like you meant that the Windows server that runs as an OpenVPN server needs a restart in its entirety for ssh and web interfaces to come back up. As in, you have to restart the entire OS to get the ssh and web interface to work again. In that case... I have no idea why OpenVPN is even involved here or why we're even talking on this forum. That then sounds more like an issue with the ssh and web interfaces that has nothing to do with OpenVPN at all.

In any case, on Windows, services tend to be controlled through the 'net' command. You just need to know the service name. If the service name is for example "bla bla" then you run;
net stop "bla bla"
net start "bla bla"
net restart "bla bla"

You can usually find out the service name in the 'services.msc' screen.

Good luck,
Johan