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OpenVPN works great when you're connecting two tunnels over a stable, reliable connection. However, when one of the nodes is connected to the internet via an unstable internet connection (unstable: lots of dropped packets, inconsistent speed, constant out-of-order packets, high latency, etc.) OpenVPN will "fail" continuous timeouts and packet non-delivery regardless of whether the tunnel is being made over UDP or TCP.

Is there a software VPN platform that will perform adequately under such circumstances? I have tested PPTP but the result was subpar - it did not drop packets the way OpenVPN did, but the resulting connection was maybe 50 - 100x slower than w/out a tunnel.

Or are there options in the OpenVPN configuration file (either on the server- or client-side) that one may set to make it more resistant to lossy connections over badly-performing pipes?

Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
  • 3,993

1 Answers1

3

With a bad connection, it will be hard to have a good VPN :) but the unique option I can think of is to use the keepalive directive with a small time period in openvpn config file if you are not using it already. This way as soon as your connection fails it will be restarted.

# The keepalive directive causes ping-like
# messages to be sent back and forth over
# the link so that each side knows when
# the other side has gone down.
# Ping every 10 seconds, assume that remote
# peer is down if no ping received during
# a 120 second time period.

# changing the default to every 5s and 20s time period
keepalive 5 20
laurent
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