OpenVPN Support Forum

I am using OpenVPN AS 2.6.1 on a perimeter CentOS 7 box at home. My wife and I use OpenVPN client 2.5.0.100 on Windows 10 Pro boxes to access our home network. Yesterday I kicked my power strip and powered off my workstation at work while connected to my home network via the client. When my workstation came back online, I was able to ping and resolve addresses via command line, but the shell was unaware that it was connected to the Internet. There was a yellow ! on my network connection and none of the shell apps (browsers, etc.) were able to access the Internet. I rebooted twice then it occurred to me what may be happening so I reconnected to my home network via the client and shell apps could again communicate. Functionality was retained after I correctly disconnected from my home network as well.

Would this be considered a bug? It would seem that while connected, the client is making a change that the shell apps see but command line utilities do not. Is this a known issue?

+1. The same issue happened to me last night. Was connected from my home Windows 10 client to our work network vial the OpenVPN client (2.7.1.101) - Access Server V2.7.3. Lost power at home while connected. After that Windows was convinced that I did not have network access. I rebooted several times, tried disabling network drivers, changing IPV4 settings, cleared DNS cache, ETC. I even had a VM running via VirtualBox on the same machine that DID have internet access. NSLOOKUP from the command line to google.com worked just fine, but ping google.com failed.

The only thing that fixed this issue was reconnecting via the OpenVPN VPN client and then gracefully exiting. Then everything was back to normal.

I spent all day working on this. I finally stumbled across a post online where someone with the same issue performed some WireShark traces and found that a lot of network traffic was still going to the network that he was previously VPN'd to with OpenVPN:

https://superuser.com/a/1422126

I would definitely consider this a bug.

Please always make sure you're using the latest available software clients. Often these types of bugs are already resolved in up-to-date releases, and it's just older client software still floating around where such an issue can occur.

This is a bug in the software. I have proved it. I downloaded the newest release of software today and it has the problem. Who will fix this problem? When will it be fixed?

After a power failure, the VPN sometimes connects after the user is logged in. The VPN does not connect until the user is logged in. I have set the login credentials on the OpenVPN service so the VPN connects after the computer is booted and before the user logs in. This works if you do a restart in Windows, but it does not work after a power failure.

I have attempted to use the latest OpenVPN Connect v2, and Connect v3, and connected to a VPN that pushes DNS servers, and then I killed power. Then I rebooted, and the entries were removed. I am unable to reproduce the problem you report at this time.

Using the OpenVPN client, the VPN does not connect automatically after a power failure until the user is logged in. If you do a normal Windows restart, then the VPN connects before the Windows user is logged in.

You have to pull the power plug for 30 seconds or more and plug the computer back in to duplicate the problem. This happens every time I lose power on the computer.

As a workaround I have set the Windows user to log in automatically after the computer is booted. The VPN connects at the time of login. This is very insecure. I need the VPN to connect before the Windows user is logged in.

I reported this problem more than 2 years ago and it still has not been fixed.

Hello arniebaganz,

Ultimately the problem is a broken DNS configuration in the operating system caused by an unusual situation; a power failure or system crash. The client software detects and resolves this automatically when it starts, but it needs a chance to run first to apply the fix.

You could consider the following options:
- Reconfigure the DNS settings implemented via OpenVPN so that it does not lead to a broken configuration if the computer is rudely interrupted.
- Since you want an always-on connection, consider using OpenVPN GUI in service daemon mode, or consider using OpenVPN Connect v3 in service daemon mode.
- You could workaround the problem of a broken DNS configuration by altering the 'remote' lines in your OpenVPN configuration file to use an IP address for the server address instead of a DNS hostname. Then the VPN can establish normally despite DNS being broken, and then DNS will work again as intended.

Good luck,
Johan