Detecting dead NordVPN tunnel quickly?

[Atlantica]

I am using OpenVPN (UDP) – mainly for Teams/Meet video meetings – to a NordVPN server in Europe, from an Asus RT-86U PRO client. Normally things work fine.

Lately there have been small “breaks” in the internet connection (to Europe?), causing the VPN to stop. However, even though I can see from other non-VPN devices that the local connection is back, the VPN takes up to 2 minutes to detect the link is down, and re-connect.

2 minutes is a LONG time when I am the one talking on Teams.

To me the objective is to detect a dead tunnel as soon as possible, and re-connect.

As a test I have replaced

--ping 15
--ping-timer-rem

with

--keepalive 2 10
--explicit-exit-notify 1

Any better ideas/advice?

Thanks!

 

[ColinTaylor]

I am using OpenVPN (UDP) – mainly for Teams/Meet video meetings – to a NordVPN server in Europe,

Why? For a latency sensitive application like video conferencing you're just adding more latency and complexity together with another point of failure. If you can use Teams/Meet without a VPN that would be preferable.

 

[Atlantica]

Why? For a latency sensitive application like video conferencing you're just adding more latency and complexity together with another point of failure. If you can use Teams/Meet without a VPN that would be preferable.

Because I am in country X, and the company expects calls/login from its home country Y.
(Not doing anything illegal! )

Do you have any advice regarding the question above?

 

[RMerlin]

If you are using a PC for the meeting, try using their application instead of a router tunnel - it might behave more nicely with tunnel drops. Tunnels shouldn't drop however, so also consider trying a different server.

 

[cptnoblivious]

If you are using a PC for the meeting, try using their application instead of a router tunnel - it might behave more nicely with tunnel drops. Tunnels shouldn't drop however, so also consider trying a different server.

Definitely!

Though, I'm wondering if perhaps the OP is trying to use a corporate laptop (i.e. no way to install Nord) and trying to appear to be located elsewhere ...

 

[Atlantica]

If you are using a PC for the meeting, try using their application instead of a router tunnel - it might behave more nicely with tunnel drops. Tunnels shouldn't drop however, so also consider trying a different server.

Thank you. As cptoblivious says, I'm on a corporate machine (several, in fact) which I cannot install applications on.

Since it is often I who do a lot of the talking in these meetings, and therefore I don't notice immediately that the VPN is down, I'm looking for a configuration which quickly detects the VPN is down.

(The VPN in question is NordVPN, and this seems to happen several days a week, at approximately (but not exactly) the same time.)

Thank you for your help! It is appreciated.

 

[RMerlin]

Try a different server then. I used to use NordVPN for my tests, and the local servers were always very stable for me. You probably do get the key rotation that might possibly interfere with a meeting, but that rotation interval is not configurable from the client side, it's determined by the server, so nothing you can do about it. I haven't noticed what NordVPN uses, but 1 hour is a common rotation period. They shouldn`t require a complete reconnection however, something else must be interrupting your tunnel.

 

[Atlantica]

I will try a different server - I'm unsure whether it is the server which is down (or kicks off users), or the link between Latin-America and Europe. There has been issues going from Brazil to Europe. (So I get about 500/500 Mbps nationally normally, but some days I only got 300/5 Mbps (!) to Speedtest servers in Europe/USA/South Africa. Very unbalanced.)


I also discovered something strange: the UDP ovpn config file from NordVPN has a remote-random already, but when I add extra servers both stock ASUS and Merlin only ever select the last, and when I put a "dead" VPN server as the last one, it never starts at the top of the list. It just tries the last VPN again and again.