Does the five-connection limit include those that will shortly time out?

[SurprisedItWorks 49]

When I change OpenVPN servers in my router by editing the openvpn.conf file and sending a SIGHUP to the OpenVPN client (using a script, of course), the new connection is established quickly but the old connection still shows in airvpn.org/sessions for a minute or two before timing out and being disconnected automatically.

But what happens if I already am at the five-connection limit at the beginning of this process?  Will I be judged as briefly having six connections, causing either the new connection attempt to fail or one of the old connections to be dropped?  (If the latter, which is dropped?  The oldest?  Newest?)  Or do I have a grace period in which to get the count back down to five?

Basically, I'd like to know whether I can configure to use the full five connections or whether instead I need to limit myself to four so that these temporary increases by one can be accommodated.

[OpenSourcerer 1442]

1 hour ago, SurprisedItWorks said:

or one of the old connections to be dropped

^
 

1 hour ago, SurprisedItWorks said:

The oldest?

^
 

1 hour ago, SurprisedItWorks said:

I can configure to use the full five connections

^

That was easy. Ask more of these!

[SurprisedItWorks 49]

If I understand you correctly, I cannot configure, say, five routers (five extended-family households where I manage the IT) to use Air, because then even rebooting a router will temporarily cause an overlap at Air between old and new connections for that router, with both showing as present simultaneously, bringing the total count to six.  Basically this is because dd-wrt doesn't shut the OpenVPN connection down nicely in a reboot.  So an unfortunate other relative loses router VPN just because it's the oldest connection.  I configure all these routers to reboot nightly as a relatively harmless (in our little world) anti-router-malware measure, so this problem will manifest within a day of configuring the fifth router.  FWIW, server changes are a daily thing also, because of Dallas/google, so even fixing the reboot thing would not suffice to allow using all five connections without one in reserve as a temp for changes.

And as it happens, we do have exactly five routers in our family world.  Right now they are configured using two Air accounts, for this reason.  But if this were not the problem I always guessed it would be, I'd have two more connections available.  The advent of wireguard made that a desirable thing, as suddenly I'm wanting Air wireguard tunnels on all sorts of mobile devices!

Certainly if I am willing to wrestle a snake or two to get it going, I could cobble up something in rc_shutdown to clean up the reboot situation, and I could redo my server-change code to do a full shutdown and startup rather than the fast (11s or so) SIGHUP trick.  The snakes enter via my uncertainty that I can make it all happen from the client end.  I'm imagining having to drag the Air API into this.  Too many snakes for this lazy router hacker, and it'd probably be a house of cards just waiting to crumble in some future update!  Robustness says use only four of the five explicitly.

Oh well.  Thanks for quickly clarifying.

[Staff 10018]

9 hours ago, SurprisedItWorks said:

If I understand you correctly, I cannot configure, say, five routers (five extended-family households where I manage the IT) to use Air, because then even rebooting a router will temporarily cause an overlap at Air between old and new connections for that router, with both showing as present simultaneously, bringing the total count to six.  Basically this is because dd-wrt doesn't shut the OpenVPN connection down nicely in a reboot.

Hello!

You have, since recently, a grace period for the amount of connection slots, so even if the VPN server did not free automatically the dead connection slot within the router reboot time, the new connection will not be rejected. You can also add more connection slots to a single account for a fee (contact the sales department) if necessary.

Kind regards
 

[SurprisedItWorks 49]

Thank you so much.  Those are very helpful things to know!

[NS0 0]

On 8/9/2022 at 4:41 PM, Staff said:

You can also add more connection slots to a single account for a fee (contact the sales department) if necessary.
 

How much if I want one?

[Staff 10018]

3 hours ago, NS0 said:

On 8/9/2022 at 9:41 AM, Staff said:

You can also add more connection slots to a single account for a fee (contact the sales department) if necessary.
 

How much if I want one?

In general you have the same price of a plan to add five slots (i.e you can add multiples of five). Please contact the sales department for details (open a ticket by clicking "Contact us" from the upper menu while your account is logged in to the web site.)-

Kind regards