Some businesses use a VPN built in to their Edge router to enable certain programs to communicate between store locations. These VPN tunnels sometimes stop working, and need to be fixed quickly.

Procedure

1. Determine which site is down- usually it is obvious as we won’t know a VPN is down until someone calls us.
2. Connect to the router at that location. You can either do this through the store location’s public IP and port #, or by connecting to a computer at the store location and connecting via the local IP of the gateway (e.g. 192.168.3.1).
3. Login to the router with administrative credentials.
4. In the top right corner, there is an icon for CLI. Click on that.
5. A command-line/console like window will pop up and ask you to verify administrative credentials again.
6. After verifying credentials, type show vpn ipsec sa to show the state of all VPN tunnels available on this device.
7. If the status is down:
   1. Click on the “System” option at the bottom.
   2. Scroll down to the Restart option. Click it.
   3. Confirm restart and wait for router to restart.
   4. Repeat step 6-8.
8. If the status is up:
   5. Check the router at the destination/other end of the VPN tunnel using these same instructions.
   6. If both sides are up, inform the customer that you will be restarting both routers and they will experience a brief moment of downtime, usually on the order of 5 minutes or less.