[vpnc-devel] Dead peer detection

[Darin McBride]

[I may have been having problems with my ISP's email server, so if this is a 
dupe, my apologies... I originally tried to send this on the 13th, for 
context.]

I'm not really sure what type of device is being used at the other end of my 
VPN connection.  However, vpnc was not working with it until I just upgraded 
to what Gentoo calls "0.5.2_pre20080611".  Which is great, because the Cisco 
proprietary VPN client was seg faulting on my AMD64 box.

The only problem seems to be longevity of the connection (well, that and I 
can't get vpnc to work under kvpnc, but that is probably how I'm using 
kvpnc).  With the proprietary client, I could be connected (on my 32-bit box) 
for weeks at a time - it was very stable that way.  With vpnc, though, I'm 
getting a lot of disconnects, which is not really good for running X apps, 
such as programming editors, through.

Jun 13 02:56:34 [vpnc] connection terminated by dead peer detection
Jun 13 07:09:56 [vpnc] packet too short from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Jun 13 07:10:05 [vpnc] packet too short from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Jun 13 08:56:00 [vpnc] packet too short from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

(I restarted the connection at 06:58 when I got up)

In fact, just since installing the 0611 code at about 11AM on June 11th, I've 
got 5 dead-peer terminations:

Jun 11 19:40:08 [vpnc] connection terminated by dead peer detection
Jun 12 11:06:56 [vpnc] connection terminated by dead peer detection
Jun 12 12:08:57 [vpnc] connection terminated by dead peer detection
Jun 12 19:55:19 [vpnc] connection terminated by dead peer detection
Jun 13 02:56:34 [vpnc] connection terminated by dead peer detection

It's the one especially at 12:08:57 on the 12th that would be annoying.  (The 
one at 3AM today would not be a big deal - the proprietary client which I'm 
running in parallel on another machine also lost the connection, so I'm 
assuming it's the VPN device at the other end that had the problem.)

Is there anything that I can do to help diagnose the problem here?

Thanks,