This tutorial guide will walk you through the steps to connect to a VPN server using ExpressVPN’s OpenVPN configuration files with Tunnelblick on your Mac computer. Tunnelblick is a free, open-source GUI for OpenVPN on OS X.
Prefer app setup? See the instructions for app setup for,. Jump to Download the OpenVPN configuration files To set up ExpressVPN OpenVPN with Tunnelblick, you will need to download the OpenVPN configuration files for ExpressVPN. Open the Welcome Email you received when you signed up for ExpressVPN.
Click the link in the email. If you can’t find the link,. Once you’ve clicked the link in the welcome email or signed in to the website, click on Set Up on More Devices. Click on Manual Config on the left side of the screen and then select the OpenVPN tab on the right. You will first see your username and password and then a list of OpenVPN configuration files.
Find the location(s) you want to connect to (e.g., Los Angeles, New York, Hong Kong), then download and save the.ovpn file(s) to your Downloads folder. You will need these files for. Note: Please have your username and password ready, as you will be asked to enter them later in the setup process. Download and install Tunnelblick Go to. Download the Tunnelblick installer.dmg file to your Downloads folder. Open the Tunnelblick installer.dmg file from the Downloads folder.
Double-click the Tunnelblick icon to begin the installation process. While Tunnelblick is installing, you will see a screen like this: When the installation is complete, you will see this message: “Installation succeeded.” Click Launch. Set up Tunnelblick with your OpenVPN configuration files The “Welcome to Tunnelblick” screen will ask you if you have any configuration files. You downloaded these in, so click I have configuration files. Now go to your Downloads folder, and double-click the.ovpn configuration file you want to use. You will be asked if you’d like to install the configuration for all users. Click Only Me or All Users, depending on your preference.
You may be required to enter your Mac’s username and password before proceeding. Enter the information when prompted.
When you see the screen that says, “Tunnelblick successfully: installed one configuration”, click OK. Connect to the VPN server location To connect to the VPN server location, click on the Tunnelblick icon in the top-right corner of your screen.
From the dropdown menu, select Connect server location name. When prompted to enter your username and password, enter the ExpressVPN OpenVPN username and password you found.
A notification message will appear to tell you when the connection has been established. Click the x to hide it. Disconnect from the VPN server location To disconnect from the VPN server location, click the Tunnelblick icon in the top-right corner of the screen, then click Disconnect.
Spurred by a on setting up an OpenVPN server on Windows, I decided to finally get OpenVPN working on my Mac, which is currently running as my web server / other servers. I eventually found some help, but it took awhile, so why not gather it all up here. What is OpenVPN? A VPN or Virtual Private Network essentially connects a remote machine to a network, over the Internet, securely. A common use for VPN is to let a user at home or on the road make an encrypted connection to his office’s network as if he/she were actually in the office. In this type of setup, you would be able to connect to file servers, mail servers, or printers remotely, without having to worry about someone on the Internet watching what you do and snagging private information.
I wanted to use it so I could use to connect to some of my home machines on my laptop at school. OpenVPN utilizes SSL, the same technology used to encrypt websites to make its connection secure. Its also OpenSource and free, which are two good reasons for using it. It is also fast and very powerful, once you get things set up.
One alternative to OpenVPN commonly cited is. It seems easier to set up and can run on the major 3 OS platforms. The main reason I shyed away from Hamachi, as many people do, is because it is closed source, and owned by a company. That means you just really can’t be sure about what its doing or how its doing it.
Sometimes this is acceptable, like when using Skype, but sometimes, you’d just rather have the open software. Plus, OpenVPN is a much cooler thing to have running on your system anyways. Configuring The Server This was where there isn’t a lot of Mac specific info. Most tutorials deal with using Linux or Windows. Thats fine, probably what most people have as servers.
But I wanted it on a Mac! The ever useful has a port of OpenVPN, labelled “openvpn2”.
They have the regular openvpn port, but it is an older (1.6) version, and that won’t due. Install it by using the command sudo port install openvpn2 This will get you most of the packages you need to get things going.
Now we turn to the. You can follow the Linux instructions pretty closely, and things will work out well with a few exceptions:.
The easy-rsa folder can be found at /opt/local/share/doc/openvpn2/easy-rsa. I copied the openvpn2 folder to someplace easier to find like /opt/local/etc/openvpn. You could make it easier and put it in /etc/openvpn too, but sometimes I forget to check there. The sample server and client configuration files can be found at /opt/local/share/doc/openvpn2/sample-config-files. I also grabbed the server.conf file and copied it to my simplier openvpn folder.
Making these copies will also ensure your changes won’t be overwritten when OpenVPN is updated. according to,tunnelblick might be needed to get OpenVPN working correctly. Download,the current version I got was 3.0 RC3. We will be using it as our client as well, so more info in that section below So with the help of the OpenVPN manual and the nice tip about tunnelblick, we should have a working version of OpenVPN on our server. Configuring the Client Like I mentioned, we need to connect to our server. Tunnelblick is a very elegant and easy to manage GUI front end to OpenVPN. The 3.0 RC3 version comes with everything bundled together, and all you need to do is drop it into your Applications folder.
• new: [MIDI] Support for Hercules DJ Control WAVE. • new: [Skinning] UM Pro now automatically use pro skin if you started UM Basic before. • new: [MIDI] Support for Reloop MixOn 4. • new: [MIDI] Support for Reloop Neon. • new: [MIDI] Support for Hercules P32 DJ.
Run it and you should see a little tunnel in the upper-right hand corner of your screen. It should also add the folder /Library/OpenVPN. In this folder I copied the ca.crt, client.crt, client.csr, and client.key which were created on the server during the of the tutorial. I used to move stuff over from the server. Now you can click on the tunnelblick tunnel icon and then click on “details” to get to the meat of the program. Select “edit configuration” to modify the important stuff. I basically copied OpenVPN’s sample, and pasted it into here.
Modifying the destination IP address and the location of the crt and key files. I had to use the entire path file to get these to work correctly for some reason, namely: /Users/username/Library/openvpn/ca.crt. I don’t know why I couldn’t use realitive file names, but it wasn’t having it. Also, I started by using the local IP address of my server to make sure things were working correctly before trying to connect to it from the Internet.
When that was all finished, I selected “Connect” and you should be connected to your own VPN server! If you have file sharing turned on, you can check your connection by hitting apple + k to go to the connection dialog and connecting to afp://10.8.0.1 (if you followed the tutorial exactly, else use the IP address you set it up for).
This should connect to your server. The next step is to get more machines from your intranet on the vpn. But that is for another post, as I haven’t quite figured it out yet.