Terminating OpenVPN after disconnect - how to disable reconnecting

Question

I want my OpenVPN client application (running on A) to quit when it is unable to connect (or reconnect) to a server (B). I use the UDP protocol. Both A and B are Linux systems.

More precisely, I keep on getting the following log entries.

UDPv4 link remote: [AF_INET] [remote-ip]
TLS Error: TLS key negotiation failed to occur within 60 seconds (check your network connectivity)
TLS Error: TLS handshake failed
SIGUSR1[soft,tls-error] received, process restarting
Re-using SSL/TLS context
UDPv4 link remote: [AF_INET] [remote-ip]
...

I know why A cannot access B. Instead of restarting the process, I want OpenVPN to quit.

There are some options in man openvpn that I tried using.

• I set resolv-retry to a small number (not working, the address of B can be resolved).
• I set connect-retry-max to 1 (not working, I am using UDP).

I am guessing that I am looking over some option....

EDIT: Background info: I want to do this because of firewall hole punching. B is behind a firewall that allows only SSH traffic. Before starting the client on A, I run a script that enables traffic to flow from A to B. This works for a while, but the hole in B's firewall needs to be 'renewed' after some time (e.g. due to network problems, but also because A has a dynamic IP address). Since there is no up-pre counterpart to down-pre and I do not want to apply a patch and compile OpenVPN myself to add it, I run a wrapper script on A that punches a new hole (in B's firewall) and starts OpenVPN each time OpenVPN stops running. This would work, if only OpenVPN were to quit....

Answer 1

Add the --down directive to the OpenVpn config to call a script when OpenVpn closes the tunnel. That script can close the application, or event better - sit around trying to reinitialize the hole-punching directly.