constant traffic to external IP

[Strecker25]

I set up openVPN for home use, the server is behind a netgear home router/switch with forwarding enabled on 1194 to my server. All works just fine, but i have a concern regarding the traffic being created...

on both the client and server, whether the connection is active or not, and whether the service is started or not, there is constant UDP traffic to and from my external address to the server and client on port 1194 as the source. this does not seem to be a communcation between the two, as I can take the client outside the house to another network completely and it communicates back to my external IP with constant UDP streams.

another interesting thing ive found is that if i turn off the openvpn service on either host, the traffic going from my client (or server) to the external IP gets a destination unreachable in return.

Is this traffic normal? should openvpn be constantly communicating even when dormant?

Thanks in advance

[janjust]

if the openvpn tunnel is active there will be traffic over port 1194 ; as soon as one end stops the other end will try to reach the "down" side for some time, but after a couple of minutes that should stop as well.

if both sides of the tunnel are down there should not be any traffic over port 1194 anymore - are you certain that all openvpn processes have stopped?