TAP FILE EMULATOR MAC OS HOW TO
How to tell if a VPN requires a Tun or Tap System Extension It may appear in a version of macOS Big Sur, or may appear in a later version of macOS.įor updated information about macOS Big Sur, see Tunnelblick on macOS Big Sur.
If your OpenVPN configuration file does contain a "dev-node" option, you will need to remove that option so the configuration continues to work (see below).Īpple does not announce its intentions in advance, so there may not be any prior notice of this change. If your OpenVPN configuration file does not contain a "dev-node" option, you do not need to do anything and the configuration will continue to work. If you have a Tun VPN, your configurations may continue to work in future version of macOS without you doing anything, or you might need to make a simple change to the OpenVPN configuration file so that the configuration will continue to work. Consult your VPN service provider or OpenVPN experts and support for help with doing this. However, that requires being able to change the OpenVPN configurations on both your computer and on the VPN server, and it may not provide all of the networking facilities that you are currently using. See What Apple announced, below.) You may be able to convert your Tap VPN to a Tun VPN which will work. (Apple's announcement to developers is worded differently and may mean that users will be able to use some mechanism to enable Tap VPNs to continue to work, but that interpretation is contradicted by the warning shown above. If you have a Tap VPN, a future version of macOS will cause your VPN to stop working. You might see a warning from Tunnelblick about this change, or you might see the following warning when connecting your VPN: The Long-Term ProblemĪpple has announced changes to macOS which affect many users of Tunnelblick. They have also announced that in "a future version" of macOS, you will not be able to use system extensions at all. (For simple instructions to make such modifications, see Errors Loading System Extensions.)įor a Tap VPN, Tunnelblick's Tap system extension must be loaded because macOS does not have a built-in Tap device driver.Īpple has made it more and more difficult to load system extensions with each new version of macOS.
TAP FILE EMULATOR MAC OS DRIVER
Those configuration files should be modified so that the built-in macOS "utun" device driver can be used. Most OpenVPN configuration files will automatically use the "utun" driver, but some include options that require Tunnelblick to use its own Tun system extension. To connect to a VPN, Tunnelblick needs to use a special kind of device driver:įor a Tun VPN, macOS includes a built-in "utun" device driver which can be used so that Tunnelblick's Tun system extension does not need to be loaded. Old versions of Tunnelblick will not help How to modify a Tun VPN so it will not require the Tun system extension