Many people in the same company (same corporate bloatware) are using Macbooks with Apple chips and they have no problems connecting, but my older Macbook (16-inch, 2019) with an Intel chip (2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9) almost always fails to connect. Once in awhile it will connect, maybe 1 out of 100 tries. Once it connects it doesn’t seem to have any problem remaining connected. I also tried the client on a Windows machine on the same network and it worked on all attempts (4 in a row).
I suspect that the problem has something to do with the Intel version of the client, whatever network hardware is in the Intel version of the Macbook, or something special about this specific machine.
I’ve tried v1.3.3600.11 and v1.3.3585.79.
Sometimes after clicking Connect a browser tab opens in my default browser that says “Successfully authenticated connection”, but it doesn’t happen every time. But regardless of that tab the client still fails to connect.
The Service logs in the client’s log viewer often show “connection reset by peer”
Are you aware of anything that would cause this type of issue? Are there any troubleshooting steps I could take to determine a solution?
There shouldn’t be any issues if the device has macOS Ventura or newer. There is a client debugging page in the documentation and information about a connection issue on RHEL servers in the RHEL connection fix page.
The client debugging page isn’t really helpful because none of the issues listed describe what behavior they cause. For example, I can only assume that Firewall configured incorrectly causes all VPN connections to be blocked. So I’m left guessing if any off the causes listed on the page actually generate symptoms similar to what I’m seeing.
All of the issues listed on the client debugging page seem to involve server, network, or Internet provider configuration that would affect all machines on the network. But the issue I see on one Macbook has not occurred on a different machine running Windows. The Windows machine is using the same WiFi network and Internet connection.
I can’t really follow up on the RHEL issue. I don’t control the server. But if there was an issue with the server it has been really unfortunate for me that it only affects this one machine. The other 50+ users have not reported any issues with establishing connections, but they are all using newer Macbooks with Apple chip.
The people that mange the VPN have already ordered a new Macbook for me so I doubt they are interested in pursuing any server changes just to fix a problem with one machine.
I found out that there is a pritunl CLI client. It has the same connection problem. When I start a connection with it I see multiple red failure messages pop up in the UI client and I see multiple browser tabs pop open to inform me that authentication was successful. So it is nice that they CLI client at least keeps trying and I don’t have to wait for the failure and push the button again for every failed attempt. I will just rely on this CLI automatic retrying until I get a machine with an Apple chip.
If it’s an issue with the single sign-on connection authentication there should be more information in the logs listed on that debugging page and also in the server logs.