[SurprisedItWorks]

Update to the below at https://forum.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=1172761, where I went further and posted a script for the Linksys WRT... crowd to connect the vpn restart to the SES button. Minimal modification should make it play on other routers as well.

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Hate to say it, but my experiments just now, in release 40009, suggest that the heart of the matter, the actual restart of the openvpn client, has either gotten much simpler of late or that you are just overcomplicating things a bit.

Turns out the route-down.sh and route-up.sh business is already set up to happen automagically. Do ps | grep openvpn in a wide (to see the whole command) ssh window to have a look at the original openvpn setup command. So to restart the vpn from the command line, in the ssh window to the router, just do killall -HUP openvpn or, in your linux box that is already set up to do ssh to the router with certificates (and ideally with ssh-agent and ssh-add having already been used appropriately), just do

ssh root@routerIP killall -HUP openvpn

or in bash set up an alias in .bashrc or whatever to save you the typing when you need to restart. Visiting https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/whats-my-ip/ or your favorite alternative to show you your public IP before and after will quickly confirm the restart. Or look in the GUI under Status>VPN and read the log. You'll see the restart clearly identified there.