Internet connections drop. Routers restart. ISPs have outages. Power flickers. When you manage remote devices, connection interruptions are not exceptional — they are routine. What matters is how the system recovers.
Normal Reconnect Behavior
When a ProxyPass node loses its tunnel connection, it begins reconnecting immediately. The reconnect logic uses a short backoff interval and typically re-establishes the tunnel within about 30 seconds of the connection dropping.
During the reconnect window, the node is offline. Traffic cannot flow through it, and it appears as disconnected in the dashboard. The moment the tunnel is re-established, the node is online again and all access modes resume working.
Scenario: The Weekend Power Outage
A retail store loses power Friday evening due to a storm. The ProxyPass node on the store's kiosk terminal goes offline. Your monitoring system receives a webhook notification (after the five-minute debounce).
Power comes back Sunday at 3 AM. The kiosk boots, Docker starts, the ProxyPass node container starts automatically. Within 30 seconds, the tunnel is back. If auto-update on connect is enabled, the node also checks for updates and applies them. By 3:01 AM Sunday, the node is online, current, and fully operational — without anyone touching it.
Monday morning, your dashboard shows: offline Friday 7 PM, online Sunday 3:01 AM. You know exactly what happened and when.
Indefinite Retry
The reconnect behavior is built into the node and requires no configuration. There is no retry limit — the node will keep trying to reconnect indefinitely. This matters for scenarios where a site loses internet for hours or days (power outage, ISP maintenance, seasonal shutdowns). When connectivity returns, the node reconnects without manual intervention.
Blocked Node Behavior
Blocked nodes behave differently. When you block a node, it is instructed to slow its reconnect attempts to a six-hour interval. Every attempt is rejected. The six-hour interval prevents the blocked node from consuming resources with rapid reconnect cycles.
Webhook Debouncing
For webhooks, connection drops are debounced with a five-minute window. A brief disconnection and reconnection does not trigger an offline notification. Only sustained outages — where the node remains disconnected for more than five minutes — generate a webhook event.
The result is a system that recovers from routine disruptions automatically, notifies you about real outages, and quarantines compromised nodes — all without human intervention.