Debugging dropped shell connections over a VPN

[Chuck Swiger]

On Jul 7, 2011, at 4:45 AM, Paul Keusemann wrote:
> My setup is something like this:
> - My local network is a mix of AIX, HP-UX, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris machines running various OS versions.
> - My gateway / firewall  machine is running FreeBSD-8.1-RELEASE-p1 with ipfw, nat and racoon for the firewall and VPN.
> 
> The problem is that rlogin, ssh and telnet connections over the VPN get dropped after some period of inactivity.

You're probably getting NAT timeouts against the VPN connection if it is left idle.  racoon ought to have a config setting called natt_keepalive which sends periodic keepalives-- see whether that's disabled.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck