[Enhancement] Background daemon for connection monitoring

[Rafficer]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Currently, when a connection goes down the CLI has no way of re-establishing the connection in the event it cuts, as it doesn't run a background service. This also makes it impossible for the CLI to automatically connect on boot or notify the user in such case

Describe the solution you'd like
A background daemon constantly checking the VPN connection and re-establishing it in the event it goes down.

[Rafficer]

This would then also solve #26 and #23.

[vinliao]

I'm wondering if we can make things like systemctl enable [background_daemon_name] where the daemon will ping protonvpn's server every x seconds/minutes.

[Rafficer]

Yes, that's the plan.

[vinliao]

I created a stupid simple bash script to automatically reconnect to a random vpn server every time it fails to ping google. It works fine when I run sudo ./pvpn-connect.sh but it fails to work when I run sudo nohup ./pvpn-connect.sh &. I also tried creating a service with that script, but it also doesn't reconnect.

Do you know the reason why the script doesn't work properly on background?

[bryanpaget]

Yes please! I'd like to have my VPN automatically reconnect when I wake my laptop from sleep. I have already made a systemd service to connect upon boot but it seems to be impossible (for me) to have a systemd system-sleep service to reconnect!

[cwmke]

Might want to take a look at what Mullvad does. I believe they have a background daemon and it works very smoothly.

[ddonindia]

Thanks @vinliao for original script.
I wanted to make sure ping is going through protonvpn.

#!/bin/bash

while true;
do
  status=`protonvpn status|grep -c -oh Disconnected`
  # if disconnected
  if [ $status -ne 0 ]
  then
    retry=0
    protonvpn c -r
    # if first connect isn't succesful
    # then connect again
    while [ $? -ne 0 ];
    do
        retry=$((retry+1))
        echo "retry $retry"
        protonvpn c -r
    done
  fi
  sleep 60
done

[TheWindedScriber]

Apology first- I'm no expert programmer! I had an Idea/ question. Is there a process that runs @ waking that you can add protovpn r or possibly use as a trigger for a small script? My 2 Mint boxes disconnect 100% of the time when they sleep so I wouldn't imagine a great need to monitor..?

[justwheel]

@TheWindedScriber My first thought would be to enable a service at boot with a dependency on a network connection with systemd:

Something like:

sudo systemctl enable protonvpnd.service

But it must require a network connection first in order to work correctly (I think). I'm still a systemd novice 🙂

Something like this could also be more easily packaged downstream into Linux distributions too, if it were committed to this git repo

[TheWindedScriber]

I found an example script for a service that runs on wake- not exactly sure how to configure this, but would this template work for example, just to run pvpn r?

`[Unit]
Description=some description
Before=sleep.target
StopWhenUnneeded=yes

[Service]
Type=pvpn r
RemainAfterExit=yes
ExecStop=-/path/to/your/script.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=sleep.target`

[m1k3s0]

Anybody know where we are with this? I'm encountering this issue as well. I mean, it's not the end of the world that I have to run protonvpn c --sc again after resume but it is a little inconvenient.