ciascu's Journal: OpenVPN and Restarting

Every-so-often, I come across a bug with a simple workaround that seems likely to be fairly commonly experienced, and Google is very little help. A classic example : n-m-openvpn shuts down VPN when openvpn soft-restarts. Essentially, every minute or so, my VPN dies, without any fanfare or visible notice. As I connect to my web dev network via VPN, then SSH in, the end effect is that my SSH connection hangs, mid-typing. Permanently. This is why tmux is so truly wonderful, but the underlying problem is still pretty frustrating.

As I say, Google did not draw a massive amount up that was relevant, and today (having reintroduced the problem by callously upgrading to Ubuntu 13.10) even Googling for "NetworkManager OpenVPN dropping connection" and such like did nada. Thankfully, I knew I had seen this, and the rough solution, so was able to recover it with a few more hindsight-targeted searches (e.g. "nm-openvpn-service-openvpn-helper dropping connection variables").

Of course, I should have taken necessary precautions to avoid the problem coming back, but then I did not expect it to still be an issue, or still difficult to find. Also, yes, the Launchpad NetworkManager bug-tracker would have been a good starting point, but I did not know originally whether the problem was with NetworkManager, the applet, OpenVPN, the remote end, any of the software on the VPS, and finding out would have taken more than the couple of hours over a week or two I am now whining about. "People have spent more time fixing three-line perl scripts", I hear you cry, "consider yourself lucky!" Well, true, but caveat emptor, that's why I have not used perl in ten years, and carefully honed my Regex skills to be able to hammer them out in at least one of ten relevant situations, after the fifth attempt.

So, for Google's benefit, assuming robots.txt allows Journal crawling:

Look at n-m-openvpn shuts down VPN when openvpn soft-restarts for information about NetworkManager dropping OpenVPN connections every minutes!!

Thanks and apologies for the loud noises.