MacOS – Why is the menu bar showing the VPN “Disconnecting” animation forever

macosNetworkpptpvpn

You know how when you disconnect from a VPN, you get a little scrolling "Disconnecting…" notification in the upper right notification area?

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Well, I'm getting that, but it never goes away. It's been "Disconnecting" now for 20 minutes. The VPN is not, actually, connected anymore, but the UI won't let me reconnect now.

The Network preferences panel shows the same problem:

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The console shows that the disconnect did, actually, happen:

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Somehow the only problem is that the UI is convinced that I'm still disconnecting, which makes it impossible to connect again.

Best Answer

If you're using a PPTP VPN, try manually killing the "pppd" process.

sudo killall pppd

If that doesn't solve it, you may need to add a -9 to forcibly kill the process. You should try without first though.

sudo killall -9 pppd

Related Solutions

SSH sessions hang after VPN reconnect

Unfortunately, I think each VPN client will be picky about this in its own way. Since the network is dropping from underneath the SSH connection, you will have three scenarios that could cause it to "hang", or just drop (that I can think of).

Data is flowing back and forth, and the connection is gone.
You get a new IP address when reconnecting.
Timeout/Alive conditions trigger before you reconnect.

2 Suggestions...

Use screen (you said you don't want to do this, I know, but it really is the most robust solution. There are scripts out there that can greatly enhance/automate the reconnection process).
Compare your SSH configurations. Usually stored in /etc/ssh_config or similiar.

BTW -- I don't think you should need to close windows, just do "~ ." (tilde dot). Tilde is used to control the ssh session. See the manpage for more details.

Can’t connect to some sites over VPN

Talked to a coworker who had the same problem. The issue was that the mtu was set too high on the ppp0 interface.

$ ifconfig ppp0
ppp0: flags=8051<UP,POINTOPOINT,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 1396
        inet 192.168.0.207 --> 192.168.0.200 netmask 0xffffff00

I changed it from 1396 to 1250 and it now works fine. To make the change permanent, I did the following:

$ sudo <your_text_editor_of_choice> /etc/ppp/ip-up

#!/bin/sh
/sbin/ifconfig ppp0 mtu 1250

$ sudo chmod 755 /etc/ppp/ip-up

Best Answer

Related Solutions

SSH sessions hang after VPN reconnect

Can’t connect to some sites over VPN

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