How To Configure A Long AWS VPN Client Inactivity Duration

Question

Asking again as most questions with answers are now multiple years out of date: Is there an easy way to modify the default inactivity period on my AWS VPN Client to longer than 5 seconds?
We have a couple of clients on the VPN who are on the other coast with some latency concerns--because of the short inactivity period they are experiencing temporary connection drops. It is restored most of the time automatically, however not before the program relying on the whitelisted IP address from my VPC to detect the change and boot the user.

I asked Claude, and it mentioned something about creating a lambda function that defined it, but I'm skeptical to even try this as there are users active on it.

Should/could we modify our VPN Client configuration file to include a longer timeframe?

Didier Durand · Answer

Hi,

This page of VPN client says that AWS client supports `inactive` OpenVPN directive: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpn/latest/clientvpn-user/connect-aws-client-vpn-connect.html

Additionally, this page https://openvpn.net/community-resources/reference-manual-for-openvpn-2-4/ says

```
--inactive n [bytes]
Causes OpenVPN to exit after n seconds of inactivity on the TUN/TAP device. 
The time length of inactivity is measured since the last incoming or outgoing tunnel packet. 
The default value is 0 seconds, which disables this feature. If the optional bytes parameter 
is included, exit if less than bytes of combined in/out traffic are produced on the tun/tap device 
in n seconds.
```

So, can you try that ?

Best,

Didier

How To Configure A Long AWS VPN Client Inactivity Duration

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