Hi
how can I check my VPN to see if its still working then have it restart its shelf
I was thinking of using cron but I have no idea how to go about ti

Hi,

Which VPN are you using? Openvpn, vpnc,... ?
I never had problems with openvpn to get an persistant tunnel, keepalive/reconnect seems to be implemented right. So you probably just need to configure it right.

vpnc on the other hand isn't designed for this kind of operation
I had this problem with an openwrt-box with vpnc which connects to a cisco-box.
I searched for a solution to get a persistent tunnel and found something related to openwrt (kamikaze), something for debian, and nothing did really work...
So I didn't come up with this stuff, it's mostly from https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=13980
but this setup is a bit outdated and really complex so I just used the keepalive-script and made an init-script myself, and it is working for some weeks now.

I have this init-script so that I can start/stop/restart vpnc  (when I have time, I will make a proper init-script, but this one works, ok )

/etc/init.d/vpnc

#!/bin/sh

case "$1" in
    start)
       echo "Starting vpnc connections..."
        /usr/sbin/vpnc
    ;;

    stop)
        echo "Stopping vpnc..."
        vpnc-disconnect &

    ;;

    restart)
        echo "Restarting vpnc..."
        vpnc-disconnect &
        sleep 5
        vpnc
esac
exit 0

a script that pings 2 host on the other side of the tunnel and if it get no answer from any of them the vpnc is restarted

/usr/local/sbin/vpn-keepalive

#!/bin/sh
#
# Restart VPNC if both of the specified hosts on the command line are unavailable

if ! [ $(ping -q -c 1 ${1} 2>&1 | grep "1 packets received" | sed "s/.*\(1\) packets received.*/\1/") ] ||
   ! [ $(ping -q -c 1 ${2} 2>&1 | grep "1 packets received" | sed "s/.*\(1\) packets received.*/\1/") ]; then
    echo Not alive $1 or $2, restarting VPNC
    /etc/init.d/vpnc restart
else
echo Alive $1 or $2
fi

and I run this script every minute using cron to see if 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.0.10 are reachable:
crontab -e

* * * * *  /usr/local/sbin/vpnc-keepalive 192.168.0.1 192.168.0.10 &

thats all!
and this should be adaptable for any kind of vpn, you just need a "restart" or "reconnect"-command for it

(Last edited by eleon216 on 13 Sep 2011, 18:32)

Thanks for that but the ping does n't work as I can still ping from the router but I get no traffic passed if the VPN is down

for info Im using openvpn 

Im now trying to find a away of reading the state of netdev led status and then use that to trigger a cron task

hmm... I'm not sure if I can follow you
if you can ping a host behind the tunnel, than the tunnel is still up. If you are not able to send packages from the lan behind your router to the lan behind the vpn-server, it sound more like a routing/firewall issue.

But if restarting openvpn fixes your issue, you could run this script form a client in your lan, and if it cannot ping you could restart openvpn through ssh on the router.

I use openVPN and it re-establish connection if it's dropped without any additional scripting