Running the OpenVPN client on Mac OS X can be a tricky task. It might seem trivial at the first glance, however, when you actually sit down and try to do the setup, there are many roadblocks that can come in your way. One of the major problems with Mac OS X’s setup of OpenVPN is that there are large number of places where you can go wrong. With MacBook being the most popular laptop, it is quite natural that the whole idea of using VPN on MacBook is very attractive. If you add to that the fact that there are more and more VPN services which are preferring the OpenVPN, there is a heightened requirement that you know how to setup OpenVPN client in Mac OS X.
The problem with using OpenVPN is that your computer has to do many things with the DHCP options which are pushed down to your computer. It doesn’t work by default in Mac OS, however, we will use a very popular client Tunnelblick. It is also widely used for Linux systems.
Step 1: Install Tunnelblick
Download the Tunnelblick client, and install it. Following this, you would have to create the OpenVPN configuration file for Mac OS. Actually, you can download the configuration file from the official website of the VPN service which you use. All you have to do next is to replace the current configuration file with the configuration file which you have downloaded from the website.
Step 2: Place the script
Following the configuration setup, you would have top copy a special script to /Library/openvpn. This script can be found from by searching for tap-up-down.sh. After you have placed this file in the folder, you would have to run the script accordingly, following some basic steps. This folder in which the script is placed, is also the place where the configuration file for Tunnelblick would be present.
Step 3: Run the script and editing the configuration file
After you are finished with the copying, you would have to run the script. It is a fairly, simple task. You can run the script by typing
chmod +x ~/Library/openvpn/tap-up-down.sh
Now, open the configuration file in a text editor, and place the following lines,
up ./tap-up-down.sh
down ./tap-up-down.sh
Step 4: Reenter the details
Once you have finished the above things, you would be asked by Tunnelblick to reenter the details like the username and password. If everything has gone has planned, you would be able to connect to the VPN service through the OpenVPN protocol.
The changes made by the scripts are actually very technical, and there is really no need for you to understand those in depth. Hopefully, following this tutorial, you were able to setup your OpenVPN client with Mac OS X.
