VPN idle timeout termination
You may have come across Idle Timeout terminal when using a VPN. By default, VPN tunnel is
allowed to stay up regardless of whether there is activity or not for a fixed period of time.
Mostly the VPN timeout session is as little as 10 minutes which might be too short for many users.
These values should be set to fit the needs of the company and its end users. This is
especially true with the use of SSL VPNs. The institute Cisco VPN I use, frustrates me lot because
of its frequency disconnect after few minutes of idle time. Cisco AnyConnect application
doesn’t give an option to increase the idle period too (at least in the linux client app).
A simple and light-weight solution for this issue is to avoid having an idle VPN connection. The following command pings a remote machine by sending dummy packets every 30s. This keeps the connection non-idle and VPN won’t terminate even when you are actually idle.
ping -i 30 <remote machine IP>