NOTE – Moving on from Synology

As of August 2025, all of my Synology devices have been replaced with other hardware. Since this shift makes testing changes to this project difficult, I do not plan to do any additional major development on this project.

Going forward, I only plan to respond to issues or pull requests if either:

• The issue or pull request is related to a future change that Synology might make that breaks compatibility with reconnect-vpn.sh. If this does happen, I would depend on members of the community to help develop a fix.
• The pull request is related adding or modifying a reconnect-vpn.sh Community Script.

Moving to what?

For those who are interested, the hardware that replaced my Synology devices runs either Proxmox Virtual Environment or Proxmox Backup Server bare metal, with various VMs and/or LXC containers on top.

In case you've been looking into doing something similar, I personally recommend UGREEN NAS devices. The hardware build quality feels higher than equivalent Synology devices, and it is relatively easy to boot other operating systems. Proxmox VE, in my case, has been running without issue.

What about VPN reconnects?

I originally wrote the reconnect-vpn.sh script to keep remote Synology devices connected to my local network for the purpose of offsite backups. Since moving to Proxmox, I have found the Debian OpenVPN packages to be more reliable (i.e. fewer disconnections) than those shipped with Synology DSM, and with the following systemd drop-in file, I have not had any VPN disconnections that required manual intervention.

cat > /etc/systemd/system/openvpn-client\@.service.d/restart-always-1m.conf <<'EOF'
[Service]
Restart=always
RestartSec=1m
EOF

---

---

---

synology-scripts

Scripts for Synology DSM

reconnect-vpn.sh

This script can be used as a workaround for Synology DSM's less-than-ideal reconnect behavior when a VPN connection is lost. The actual magic in this script was originally written by users on a thread on the Synology Forum. This script just provides a user-friendly wrapper to their code.

There were a number of goals in writing this script:

• Require no script modifications before putting into production
• Work with all VPN protocols (L2TP, PPTP, and OpenVPN)
• Run natively from DSM without needing backend console access
• Send email notifications when encountering warning or error conditions

This script was written for DSM 6.0.2, but from what I have seen, it will probably work on DSM 5.0 and high.

Installation

Follow the official Synology documentation to create a scheduled task.

• Make sure the task runs as root.
• This script can run frequently (e.g. every 5 minutes).
• The Send run details only when the script terminates abnormally option is recommended. The script was written using different exit codes, allowing it to work well with this option.
• In the user-defined script box, you can either:
  • Paste the entire contents of the script itself.
  • Include the full path to the script (after uploading the script to some location on your device).

Version History

• 1.1.0: Extra customization options are included at the beginning of the script. Feel free to customize these to your liking.
• 1.2.0: The following exit codes are used:
  • 0: reconnect not needed
  • 1: reconnect successful
  • 2: reconnect failed
  • 3: configuration error
• 1.3.0: An option is added to allow pinging a custom IP address or hostname to validate VPN connectivity.
• 1.4.0: An option is added to choose a specific VPN profile to reconnect, if multiple profiles exist. In this configuration, you could run multiple instances of this script, each targeting a specific VPN profile.
• 1.5.0: Options are added to run external scripts at various points. Note that the scripts must be executable, and if there are spaces in the script paths, you must either escape the spaces (e.g. NO_RECONNECT_SCRIPT=/volume1/Scripts/script\ with\ spaces.sh) or wrap the script paths in quotes (e.g. NO_RECONNECT_SCRIPT='/volume1/Scripts/script with spaces.sh'). Community-maintained scripts compatible with these features are included in the reconnect-vpn.sh Community Scripts directory.
• 1.6.0: An option is added to set a reconnect timeout, in the event the reconnect process hangs. This new option is currently considered experimental, as it is not well tested. Please feel free to open an issue if something doesn't work as expected.