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Comment by summarity | Hacker News Reader

Some time ago, decompiled the Windows client and presented my findings here: https://hackernoon.com/poking-the-bear-is-tunnelbears-client...

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I still have issues with a VPN provider who insists on using their VPN client.

Are there any nice free VPN Clients out there? I haven't been very lucky in finding any in the OS X realm

OpenVPN is free and I use it pretty often. Supports both CLI & GUI. Would highly recommend it as an excellent client.

Tunnelblick is the best option I've found for OpenVPN.

If you're using IPSec then there's a client built into the OS.

You can use the MacOS Network settings to connect to most types of VPN (hit "+" and fill in the forms to add a new connection). For free, open-source clients, Tunnelblick is very common.

macOS and iOS don't support OpenVPN with the built-in client. You can use strongSwan-based VPNs (e.g., as would be deployed through Algo) or Cisco, but for OpenVPN you'll need a custom client which, unfortunately, very likely brings along its own .kext.

Is a .kext actually required for a vpn client? My understanding is that TunnelBlick just creates a tun network in user-space. Why would it need to be in the kernel?

TunnelBlick comes with a tun/tap kext that is signed. This is not required on systems where Apple already has tun/tap support compiled in (not sure when that started, but it's been a long time)

From the known issues page:

"If you are running on OS X 10.6.8 or higher and using OpenVPN 2.3.4 or higher and using a TUN device, the default Tunnelblick setting to "Load Tun Automatically" (on the "Advanced" settings window) will avoid this problem by not loading the tun kext — OS X's built-in "utun" device will be used instead of a "tun" device."

I was hesitant to buy Viscosity, but it has been well worth the money.

Fruho is a decent VPN GUI on Linux

But the console is so easy to use; openvpn vpn_config.ovf

There your done...

NetworkManager is pretty much the default GUI for most distros and DEs, and has built-in support for OpenVPN, PPTP, L2TP, IPsec, SSH, etc... And it also integrates well with the Wifi setup, so you can easily set it up to automatically connect to the VPN when you connect to certain networks.

Works great with Cisco Anyconnect too. My setup even automatically pulled an RSA token from my stoken config.

Secure Pipes.

After macOS deprecated pptp I stumbled upon the flow vpn client[0]. Replace the hostname, enter your credentials and it just works!

[0]: https://www.flowvpn.com/download-mac/

Viscocity

https://www.sparklabs.com/viscosity/

Viscosity is nice on Windows. I think it costs 10 bucks, though... on Linux I don't know, I use CL.

Nice writeup. Not sure I agree about DNS transparent proxying being rampant in ISPs (at least in the US).

Pretty sure T-Mobile still does it.

T-Online does, o2, too. See previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13037858

The link is a test tool.

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