The dd-wrt Keep Alive screen
In dd-wrt, under the Administration Tab, Keep Alive subtab, there’s a great feature that I recommend you take a look at. I develop routers that work with the StrongVPN service. It’s an amazing service, run by great people. The dd-wrt router configuration for PPTP is wonderful but if the connection gets dropped, it isn’t able to reconnect. That’s a limitation of the dd-wrt PPTP client, not StrongVPN. In order to address the problem, I recommend turning on the WDS/Connection Watchdog under Keep Alive. You can see from the image above how to set it up. I set the interval to 360 and the address to a known address that will always be available if the internet is up. 8.8.8.8 is one of the public DNS servers that Google provides.
Basically, with the configuration above, the router tries pinging the Google DNS server at 8.8.8.8. If it gets a response, no action is taken. If there is no reply to the ping, the router reboots. In our case, the PPTP connection is established as a part of a startup routine, so the reboot forces that reconnect.
