Mac OS X Snow Leopard VPN stops working

Alec Jacobson

April 18, 2011

weblog/

All of a sudden my VPN client (the one built into Mac OS X 10.6) asked me for my password. I'd already been logged into the NYU VPN for a few hours. I accidentally clicked cancel. I tried to reconnect, but now I kept getting this error:

A configuration error occurred. Verify your settings and try reconnecting.

The little icon in the corner would spin and read "Connecting..." but this error would pop up even before it prompted me for my username and password. So in true Mac style I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how I could fix this without restarting. (I'm sure restarting would have worked just fine). Turns out VPN couldn't connect because another similar process was (already) running. By opening up Terminal.app I issued:

ps -ef | grep racoon

and saw:

    0 84139     1   0   0:00.06 ??         0:00.13 /usr/sbin/racoon

Then I issued:

sudo kill 84139

I reconnected VPN and all is well.