Viscosity not working with Perfect Privacy VPN on MacOS Tahoe

Viscosity Support (macOS)
1

I have been using Viscosity with the Perfect Privacy VPN service for several years now. The first time I tried to connect after upgrading to Tahoe, it does not work. Viscosity claims authentication failed and its logs show a control message of AUTH_FAILED was received. (Note, it is annoying that when things fail there isn’t an easy way to see the logs from that connection attempt. You have to go to the details view and try again.)

However, I can successfully log into the website with the same credentials and can successfully connect with ssh from terminal.app. Viscosity resets the keychain saved creds on this failure, and I copied the password directly from my password manager, same as when logging into the web site and ssh. So I am confident I have provided Viscosity the correct password.

Happy to provide copies of the Viscosity logs as well as the ssh output from their respective connection attempts if that helps. But since ssh on the same system can connect, that appears to point towards an issue with Viscosity.

Is this a known issue?

2

Hi mdubois,

There are no known issues with the current version of Viscosity (1.11.5) on macOS 26. I’m afraid in this instance it’s likely just a coincidence, but of course we never rule anything out.

The error message you’re seeing is sent by the OpenVPN server: it indicates that it is actively rejecting your VPN connection attempt. It could be that it doesn’t consider the username/password is valid, but it could also be for a different reason too: for example your provider could have updated the OpenVPN server’s configuration and your client settings are now unable to connect, or your client certificate is no longer valid (in which case downloading the latest configuration files and importing them into Viscosity should resolve the issue).

You can find more information on how to resolve the error at:

Viscosity will remember connection log details for prior connection attempts (although these will be cleared when Viscosity is quit) up to the log limit. When opening the Details window click on the connection name at the top of the window, and then select the connection you wish to view the log for. If no connection is active the Details window will display the first connection from the list, so if you have multiple connections it may look like the log is empty until selecting the recently connected connection.

Cheers,
James

3

I tried recreating the connection from the download I did in August, and that didn’t work. But a fresh download of the configuration files did work. So it must have been bad timing like you say.

Thanks for the response!