Cisco ASA Client VPN Disconnect Reasons

Julie Russell
Network Girl
Published in
2 min readMar 1, 2015

Looking for more information about those %ASA-4–113019 session disconnects in your logs, especially the illusive “administrator reset”?

So was I. So I did a few experiments to see which “reason” my Cisco ASA gave me under different circumstances.

In my ASA logs, I typically saw four “reasons” for disconnects, for which there was zero explanation in Cisco’s documentation:

  • Administrator Reset
  • User Requested
  • Lost Service
  • Peer Reconnected

Here’s what I found typically for each “reason” for the disconnect. Leave me a note if you’ve found more & I’ll add them to this post.

Reason: Administrator Reset

I saw this illusive, not quite apt named “reason” in these instances:

  1. When my primary Internet connection failed. In my log reading, I saw this error prior to the client VPN disconnect:
    %ASA-6–622001: Removing tracked route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 <snip>
    and then this message for a few VPN users, which is a clue also:
    %ASA-4–113019: Group = group_name, Username = name, IP = x.x.x.x, Session disconnected. Session Type: IPsecOverNatT, Duration: h:m:s, Bytes xmt: x, Bytes rcv: x, Reason: Administrator Reset
    Note: you’ll only see the ASA-622001 message if you’re using tracked routes to fail over to a backup Internet connection.
  2. When I forcibly disconnected the user account with:
    # vpn-sessiondb logoff name name
    But I don’t do that often, or I’d end up with really annoyed users!

Reason: User Requested

Not surprisingly, I saw this “reason” for the disconnect when I disconnected my VPN client.

I’ve also seen this disconnect reason when the user’s internet provider does not allow the IPSec protocol and ports needed.

Reason: Peer Reconnected

I saw this “reason” when I turned off wireless on my laptop before disconnecting VPN.

Reason: Lost Service

I saw this “reason” when I disconnected the cable between my wireless router and the Internet — simulating a drop from my Internet provider.

Are there more reasons you’ve seen? Write a response please. This post gets a lot of google search traffic, and we all know troubleshooting Cisco things are not simple!

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Julie Russell
Network Girl

Member of Alabama Street Writing Group | Previous Eng Manager at Medium | Past Board Member of NaNoWriMo nonprofit | Opinions are all & always mine.