Stale PID?

Could you please explain a little bit more about your problem? What you were doing when you got this message? Did it get stuck in this state? Was you able to start/stop profile before/after this message?

Waiting on customer feedback

I didn't write the first post, but I'm also having the same problem.

OS 10.4.3, AlmostVPN 0.9.4

My AlmostVPN is configured with one account, and one Drive. When I click "Start", it goes through the startup procedures, then says "profile default is running". After about 5 seconds, it decides it is not running (says "Almost VPN™ is not running"), and gives the message "Stale PIDs file". There is no mention of the stopping of AlmostVPN or the stale PIDs file in the console.log.

What other information can I supply?

1. create empty file ~/Library/Applications Support/AlmostVPN/debug
2. try to start your profile again
3. when it fails, attach following files to this ticket (use "Attach File" button )

   ~/Library/Applications Support/AlmostVPN/almostvpn.log
   ~/Library/Applications Support/AlmostVPN/launchd.*.plist
   

Log file starting from boot

The goal of the attached configurations is to forward DNS traffic through a server, giving the ability to use a different DNS server, and thus, possibly different DNS results. (This is useful in China, where they block certain websites by simply returning incorrect DNS lookups.)

The configuration doesn't work on startup. Then, when I click "Start" in AlmostVPN, it starts running, but soon stops saying that the password/identity is incorrect. On the next try of the "Start" button, it starts running, but soon stops, and gives the stale PID error. On each subsequent attempt, it will give this same error. Notice that when this error happens, the .log file has no idea that the configuration has stopped.

I tried making the tunnels by hand in the terminal:

> /usr/bin/ssh -g -o UserKnownHostsFile=/Users/pcronin/.ssh/known_hosts -L:139:zion:139 pcronin@cronin.dyndns.org -N
> pcronin@cronin.dyndns.org's password:
>
(Note that on the remote computer, zion above resolves to the local internal IP address of the remote computer itself.)

This connected and worked, until I tried to actually use the tunnel by mounting an smb partition with finder's "Connect to server." In the terminal window, errors popped up:

channel 2: open failed: administratively prohibited: open failed

My research on this error suggests that the numbers in the -L options aren't right. So, I changed them:

> /usr/bin/ssh -g -o UserKnownHostsFile=/Users/pcronin/.ssh/known_hosts -L:139:127.0.0.1:139 pcronin@cronin.dyndns.org -N
> pcronin@cronin.dyndns.org's password:
>

And that's all that was needed to work the long way. So, the AlmostVPN connection was successful, but the TCP forwarding wasn't. I don't know if it'll be tough for AlmostVPN to catch that... Anyway, when that error happened, the AlmostVPN console knew that it wasn't running anymore (probably from monitoring the PID of the ssh process), and gave the error "Stale PID," maybe indicating it was aware there was no connection but there was a PID file still there...

I've put a lot of time in trying to get the right numbers in AlmostVPN to make the magic happen, but still I have no luck. I'll keep trying...

Same problems as above. Does Almost VPN allow the session to run as root? If not, can this feature be added?

To the best of my knowledge (based on direct contact with the person who reported the "problem above"), it is not a problem any more ( I think at least starting from version 0.9.5). If you are using latest version ( which is 0.9.7 as of today 12/30/05 and it is going to be 0.9.8 tomorrow ) and still having problems, then could you please open separate ticket and describe your problems in more details.

Almost VPN sessions always run as root (via sudo).