Tag Archives: openvpn

Viscosity and Search Domains

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I’ve really enjoyed Viscosity as my openvpn client for Mac OS X (instead of Tunnelblick). It’s stable, bounces back after system sleep, and is well supported.

After upgrading from 1.0.3 to 1.0.4, I found that my search domain configuration from the Network Settings control panel wasn’t being respected anymore while the VPN was up. I got the following reply (in 30 minutes, no less):

The 1.0.3 behavior was actually a bug (your system should use any search domains associated with the VPN connection for security reasons, rather than local search domains).

You can specify search domains to use while connected instead like so:

1. Edit your connection in Viscosity
2. Click on the Advanced tab
3. Add the command “dhcp-option DOMAIN mydomain.com” (no quotes) where mydomain.com is your search domain
4. Repeat step 3 for each search domain you have
5. Click Save and try connecting

These instructions worked perfectly. Thanks!

Tunnelblick crash recovery

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I’ve found that waking my mac from suspend in a different network than it went to sleep in can crash tunnelblick, or cause tunnelblick to try to spin up another openvpn instance, leaving the network wedged. The workaround is to invoke this in a terminal:

sudo killall -v openvpn

then relaunch tunnelblick.

If that doesn’t work, force-unloading the kernel extension does the trick:

sudo killall -v openvpn
sudo killall -v Tunnelblick
sudo kextunload -b foo.tun

then relaunch tunnelblick.