Linux : OpenVPN client connection timeout after 24 hours

By | September 21, 2014

You probably experienced VPN session disconnection exactly 24 hours after you established the connection. Well, this is an expected behaviour since the OpenVPN Access Server implement a default 24 hours session timeout for user-locked and server-locked profiles.

To workaround this limitation, you may set the timeout to a higher value using the following command :

/usr/local/openvpn_as/scripts/sacli --key vpn.server.session_expire --value <TIME_VALUE_IN_SECONDS> ConfigPut

Make your changes effective by restarting the Access Server process (I’m using “start” here instead of “restart” since it returned an unexplainable error. SA daemon is “smart” enough to restart and reload the configuration if it’s already running) :

/usr/local/openvpn_as/scripts/sacli start

So let’s say we want to put the session timeout to a week, the first command would look like :

/usr/local/openvpn_as/scripts/sacli --key vpn.server.session_expire --value 604800 ConfigPut