Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic there have been many people switching from working in the office to telecommuting at home. This has required many individuals who are not typically used to working remote get used to operating a VPN client.
An issue we kept running into was a report that every day at a specific time the FortiClient VPN connection would drop. The odd thing was that this specific time of dropping was the same time for the same person, but not the same time across all users having the issue. Eventually we traced the issue back to someone who started work everyday at about 5:45 AM and everyday the connection would drop at 1:45 PM. This lead us to find out what the default SSL VPN timeout setting was for Fortigate SSL VPN access. Per below, the default timeout setting for an SSL VPN client was 28800 seconds – ie. 8 hours.
After some discussion we decided to increase the timeout value to 43200 – 12 hours.
Once the commands were entered on the Fortigate above these disconnect reports went silent.
mickx009.org 