vpnc disconnects after 7-8 hours consistently

[Paul Michali]

Binary package hint: vpnc

With both 10.04 and 10.10 I was seeing a consistent occurrence of vpnc disconnecting after 7.5 hours or so. I see a message about disconnected by peer. There are numerous coworkers who have seen the same issue.

From this web page discussion: http://lists.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/pipermail/vpnc-devel/2009-October/003285.html

I pulled a version, vpnc 0.5.3 r449-2, and commented out the line as suggested in the web discussion, and I can connect w/o drops (I've been connected over 12 hours at times).

The web discussion mentions some re-keying issue.

Is it possible to incorporate this, or some equivalent fix, into vpnc?

Thanks!

[klicki (carsten-brede)]

In my case the rekeying happens every 60m and then the connection is gone. It is a serious flaw and should be addressed.

[ChrisAD (chris-adale)]

I have tried getting the answer here: http://superuser.com/questions/309723/vpnc-it-keeps-disconnecting-after-24-minutes

[Ralph Schmieder (ralph-schmieder)]

this is possibly due to the lack of IKE rekey as mentioned here https://svn.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/vpnc/trunk/TODO ('implement phase1 rekeying (with or without xauth-reauthentication)')

I've proposed a patch here:
http://lists.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/pipermail/vpnc-devel/2015-June/004163.html

[Boris Hollas (borish)]

vpnc still keeps disconneting on 16.04. Sometimes, I need several attempts to connect.

[Dan Lenski (lenski)]

I've tested @Ralph Schmieder's patch and it gets the job done. Prevents my VPN from hanging at the expiration of the IKE key lifetime.

You can find a slightly cleaned-up source tree with it applied here: https://github.com/dlenski/vpnc/commit/27a7a1b9daee88e000c18001222e2e53e348e378

Any reason the Ubuntu maintainers didn't apply this one already?