Monday, April 13, 2009

Setting up a VPN connection to an Astaro security applicance on Mac OS X

So I finally got a working VPN configuration to be able to connect my shiny new MacBook Pro to our VPN on our production system which uses an Astaro firewall appliance. Turns out it's fairly easy too :


  • Go to your Astaro firewall's user profile page, ie login as a user, and download the key / OpenVPN configuration package for your router. The great thing about these appliances is that they provide the package for you right from the device

  • Download Tunnelblick. It's an (apparently very easy to use) GUI front end for OpenVPN on Mac OS X. The latest version (as of the time of this writing) is 3.0 beta 10. Tunnelblick is hosted on Google Code. The installation's even easier. Load up the disk image, and drag the sole application icon into your applications folder.

  • Open the VPN package you downloaded from your Astaro firewall appliance, and copy everything in it to the ~/Library/openvpn folder created by the Tunnelblick installation

  • Tunnelblick should automatically detect the additional files and provide a listing for the Astaro configuration in its connection list. Once you've got the item in the list, just click on it and it should automagically connect to the Astaro firewall appliance and your VPN connection should be working.



Oh, and make sure you've actually got Tunnelblick started, or else you won't be able to connect ;)

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