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I'm testing out a Cisco SA520W for some remote retail locations we manage.

The one thing that is currently holding me back on it is I haven't found a way to set the VPN connection to connect when the device comes on, or better yet to "always have it up" to where if it loses the connection it tries to re-open it.

I can live with it just coming up on boot as the users on site are typically familiar with power cycling the firewall before calling in with issues.

The IPSec VPN comes up and functions fine, but has to be done so manually.

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From my experience, Cisco devices won't preemptively initiate IPsec connections until it sees some traffic destined for the remote subnet on the other end of the VPN.

Have you tried just pinging across the VPN tunnel? That should force it to start up.

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I will give that a try to see, it might be enough. However, the communication won't always be initiated from the network that is behind the Cisco firewall. – ManiacZX Nov 3 '10 at 0:19
What I've done in similar circumstances is just have use cron or a scheduled task to sind a single ping through the VPN, one host in each direction, once per minute. That should take care of keeping the tunnel up as well as getting it established again following an outage. – ErikA Nov 3 '10 at 0:23
It does look like it brings up the tunnel when traffic destined for that network arises. – ManiacZX Nov 3 '10 at 15:45
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