My VPN hit 100,000 connections and I freaked out for no reason

I run a tiny VPN server for my family, just 5 people, and last Thursday my dashboard showed we crossed 100,000 total connections since 2019. That number made me panic, I thought someone hacked the setup or my logs were corrupted. Turns out my brother set up auto-reconnect on his router with a 1 minute timer, so it was basically spamming reconnects every day for 2 years. I fixed the timeout setting and now we're back to normal, but has anyone else seen a weird spike in logs that turned out to be a dumb device setting?

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hill.margaret29d ago

Did your brother ever explain why he set the reconnect to 1 minute? I had something similar with my parents' security camera, turned out my dad had a "keep alive" feature on that kept pinging the server every 30 seconds for like six months. The log looked like a crazy bot attack, but it was just his old phone on a bad wifi adapter. I only figured it out when I saw the same MAC address over and over again in the failures...