[chjohans]

I have a E3000 router at home and another E3000 router at a remote location. Both routers are identical and both routers are running DD-WRT v24-sp2 (12/24/10) std-usb-nas - build 15962. Both routers are rock stable with this firmware version. The remote router has a fairly simple config and the router at my home has a much more complex setup.

The router at home is configured to accept incoming VPN connections (PPTP) and the PPTP Client on the remote router is configured to connect to my home router. Routing is configured correctly (under Setup -> Advanced Routing on both routers) so that all the LAN clients on both sides can access the whole network on the opposite side. When freshly booted this works just fine.

Since the remote routeris dialing into my home router I assume there must be some traffic on the remote LAN for my home network for the connection to be established. If I ssh into the remote router and "ping" my home router the VPN connection will be established and is working fine.

The problem is that after some time the VPN connection will close and no matter what I do on the remote side it wont be established again. After a reboot of the remote router I can ssh into the router and "ping" my home network so the connection will be established again. Any other attemts from the remote LAN to contact my home LAN will also establish the VPN connection. But the problem is that after it is closed, which seems randomly to me, I have to reboot the remote router to establish the connection again.

Does anyone know how to make this connection "permanent"? I want the connection to be established even if there is no traffic between the two networks. And I want it to remain open. And if it falls down I would like it to be re-established as soon as possible.

I could probably make some sort of script and run it by cron once in a while but I have no idea how to check for an active VPN connection and/or how to "force" it to be etsblished. There must be some command(s) to do this but I have looked high and low without finding what I need. So please gentlemen, if you know something about this then please let me know.

Oh, and I would also like to know if it's possible to make the PPTP connection bi-directional so that both sides can open an PPTP connection. I tried to configure the PPTP client on both sides but that was pretty unsuccessful, neither side would connect. Is this something that is supposed to work?

Thanks in advance for any input on these topics

[chjohans]

I would still greatly appreciate any input on this, especially on how to manually (in a script) drop and re-establish the VPN connection.

Right now I have set up my remote router with "Keep Alive" so that it will automaticvally reboot when it's loosing contact with my main router (that is - when the VPN connection for some reason drops).

But this is not reeally practical, there might be a whole lot of reasons why the VPN connection drops and a reboot might not even help (temporary failure somewhere on the net between the two routers). So I would like to make a script that tries to re-establish the VPN connection when it drops, instead of rebooting the router.

Anyone know how to do this? Or at least, does anyone have any pointers to the "VPN related commands" in DD-wrt?

[somms]

OpenVPN Site to Site Connection Using DD-WRT Capable Routers

You may investigate switching to OpenVPN build dd-wrt since this worked great for when my kid was off at school!

[habeIchVergessen]

did you checked out the feature set of openvpn's management interface?

if you find any useable commands than you can send this with nc to the management interface.