OpenVPN Support Forum

Hi all.

We are running OpenVPN on OpenSUSE 11.1 which uses the service command for process control. The syntax is as follows:

service service name start|stop|restart|reload|status

All of these work with the exception of reload. When running service openvpn reload , (when openvpn is already running), it returns done, but running service openvpn status after it returns dead.

We would like to be able to reload the service, (for config changes), on the fly with out having user sessions dropped. Is this possible?

Reload usually sends a SIGHUP to the daemon. OpenVPN does not gracefully handle this. In order to do this, you need to log in to the management interface and tell OpenVPN to reload the configuration.

This is done with the signal command from the management interface, correct?

Like this:

signal SIGHUP

This produces exactly the same results. service openvpn status = dead It must be restarted.

Am I overlooking something?

Please advise.

Thanks in advance.

Just wanted to update this thread, we moved OpenVPN to SLES 10SP2, (management's decision), and I have made on-the-fly config changes, and used service openvpn restart, since the service downtime is so short our windows clients using openvpn-gui don't notice that the connection died for a second. so problem un-noticed.

george wrote:Just wanted to update this thread, we moved OpenVPN to SLES 10SP2, (management's decision), and I have made on-the-fly config changes, and used service openvpn restart, since the service downtime is so short our windows clients using openvpn-gui don't notice that the connection died for a second. so problem un-noticed.

Thanks for the update!