VPN drops connection after sleep and don't reconnect.

Question

Level 1

6 points

VPN drops connection after sleep and don't reconnect.

When I put computer to sleep and return it automatically reconnects to wireless network, but don't reconnect to VPN network.
Is there a way to make it automatically reconnect VPN after you return from sleep?
This issue was in 10.4 and now it's still the same in 10.5 despite that Networking Preferences panel was reworked.
It's highly annoying problem and it's been there for long time already.

This means nobody at Apple uses VPN, otherwise they would fix it long time ago.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on Oct 28, 2007 7:55 PM

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Answer 1

RomanR Author

Level 1

6 points

Oct 29, 2007 12:14 AM in response to Templeton Peck

The problem is:
OSX does not re-establish VPN connection when sleep was for longer time and display the error message without even trying to re-establish the connection.

OSX do reconnect VPN when it was in sleep mode for short time! When you come after short sleep the status bar show "reconnecting to VPN' and then it works fine.

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Answer 2

Oct 28, 2007 7:57 PM in response to RomanR

What?!

It's a server side configuration issue... if a connection has been asleep for hours, it's closed on the server side and you need to reconnect.

This isn't a bug; this is standard. If you put your machine to sleep for too long you'll need to re-authenticate.

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Answer 3

Oct 28, 2007 7:59 PM in response to RomanR

*"When I put computer to sleep and return it automatically reconnects to wireless network, but don't reconnect to VPN network. "*

Well of course it doesn't. Neither do most Windows VPN clients. As William said, that's a server side policy, and has nothing to do with OS X, so please don't make snap judgments about something until you get all the facts.

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Answer 4

RomanR Author

Level 1

6 points

Oct 28, 2007 11:04 PM in response to William Lloyd

Here's the message dialog shown after wake up:

Internet Connect You have been disconnected form PPTP server because the network configuration has changed.

Yes, sometimes it reconnects by itself. But don't think it's because of VPN server-side timeout. When you're in sleep for short enough time, the Wireless connection is not fully killed off and reconnects instantly, and VPN connection is not lost! In longer sleep periods it takes longer time to reconnect wireless, that's when VPN connection drops. But reconnection of wireless takes 2-5 seconds, it's not that big problem OSX shouldn't work around easily.

So the problem is OSX should detect that network connection was interrupted by sleep and it's reconnecting. Restoring the connection usually takes 2-5 seconds. So why it show up this message when OSX can reconnect just fine?
This message is shown about 10-20 seconds after wake up. By that time wireless connection is already re-established and OSX should retry VPN connection automatically.

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