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Tunnelblick Alternative for OpenVPN on Leopard

2008-05-14 09:04:52

I've written before about how great OpenVPN is, and how to set it up. I've always been using Tunnelblick as a nice little GUI to do the client side connection on Mac. But Tunnelblick has some problems on Leopard, and I think the maintainer is quite busy with something else; it's been semi-broken for a while, and the last release was October 2007. The main problem is hanging: sometimes you just can't quit, and even kill -9 doesn't kill the process, it's just totally zombied out. Rebooting works, but the shutdown takes a while as the OS times out on the dead Tunnelblick.

I found that Macports has openvpn2 easily available. So I simply:

sudo port install openvpn2

Then:

cd ~Library/openvpn sudo openvpn2 --config work.conf

Actually I made an alias to do the second part so I can just quickly connect without thinking about it.

Works like a charm.

Update: my pal Kristin pointed me at this page, which is important and helpful, in that it has a pointer to a leopard tun/tap driver. Which you need.