Cronjob for restarting a dead VPN connection

[erak]

Hi,

I have a problem that my VPN client connection dies intermittently. It doesn't disconnect though, just stops working.

My idea is a cronjob which checks the connection (a ping for example) every few minutes, and restarts the VPN connection if it's down.

Is this possible, any ideas?

[erak]

Ok, so I was searching for the correct command for starting the VPN client service. But it turns out, if I just issue "killall pppd", it restarts itself.

I thought the command was "pppd call <profile> updetach", with the saved profile in /etc/ppp/peers/
But it generated the following error:

Couldn't open the /dev/ppp device: No such device or address
Please load the ppp_generic kernel module.

But it works if I'm already connected... No reason to divulge in this error though.

It feels unnecessary to add an extra ping when the DDNS service already is running. Is there a way to read the status from ddnsd? When the VPN is down, the status in the Control Panel read: "<Cannot detect external address>".

[erak]

Update:

I found the file /tmp/externalIP.result

Now I just have to wait until the VPN connection fails and see what it reports.