iphone feasibility...

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scubes13

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Joined: Tue Mar 03, 2009 2:03 pm

Post by scubes13 » Sun Jul 12, 2009 3:39 am
Just received my iPhone 3GS.... deeply saddened to see no support for OpenVPN. I use Viscosity on a daily basis from my Mac to connect to OpenVPN connections. We utilize pfSense firewalls for the most part, and unfortunately the PPTP service of pfSense apparently has issues with iPhone's PPTP client.... Anyways, I was wondering what the chances were of the Viscosity team developing and marketing an iPhone OpenVPN client/app?

Thanks for the read. And thanks to Viscosity for such an awesome program and such an amazing price! We as customers have certainly received a great deal with this program.

Kevin L.

Mods: if this is the wrong forum to post this, please accept my apologies and feel free to move it. Just wasn't sure if it were a support question or feedback... Thanks again!

James

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Post by James » Tue Jul 14, 2009 9:12 pm
Hi Kevin,

An iPhone client is something we have been working towards (and certainly something we'd love to release!), however it's unlikely we'll have anything anytime soon (if at all). While OpenVPN itself is relatively easy to get running on a (jailbroken) iPhone, the TUN/TAP drivers OpenVPN relies on to actually create a connection are not.

The iPhone's OS is missing key components necessary to be able to get the TUN/TAP extensions running. We're working on our own TUN/TAP implementation from scratch to try and work around these dependencies, however this is slow going. Obviously if we get anywhere we'll post up a notice on our website. Or at the very least, if we get a semi-functional TUN and/or TAP implementation we'll be sure to post the source online for others to hopefully continue.

Cheers,
James
Web: https://www.sparklabs.com
Support: https://www.sparklabs.com/support
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sparklabs

Andul

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Joined: Sat Oct 15, 2011 10:57 pm

Post by Andul » Sat Oct 15, 2011 11:01 pm
Hi,

just read your post from 2009 and wondered if you could made any progress on iPhone support? We are using your client already on Mac OS X and Windows and would like to use it also on our iPhone devices we plan to buy.

occamsrazor

Posts: 10
Joined: Mon Apr 26, 2010 5:42 am

Post by occamsrazor » Wed Oct 19, 2011 10:00 am
Hope this isn't inappropriate (I would love to see Viscosity for IOS) but if you need a solution now and your iPhone is jailbroken, you can use:
http://www.guizmovpn.com/

James

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Joined: Thu Sep 04, 2008 9:27 pm

Post by James » Thu Oct 20, 2011 7:46 am
Hi Andul,

See the "Viscosity and the App Stores" post on our blog for full details:
http://www.thesparklabs.com/blog/

Cheers,
James
Web: https://www.sparklabs.com
Support: https://www.sparklabs.com/support
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sparklabs

cudiaco

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Joined: Tue Dec 06, 2011 2:01 am

Post by cudiaco » Tue Dec 06, 2011 2:03 am
No hope in getting contact with apple to see if you can get permission to use some of the private APIs mentioned?
I realize this subject has been beaten to death (even on apple's forums), but I would love to be able to have OpenVPN on my iOS device.

James

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Joined: Thu Sep 04, 2008 9:27 pm

Post by James » Tue Dec 06, 2011 10:34 pm
Hi cudiaco,

Unfortunately it's all a no-go (it seems that only Apple are allowed to break their rules). There is a private VPN framework available that we might be able to get permission to use (Cisco are allowed to use it), however this wouldn't be of much use without a major rewrite of OpenVPN.

I think it'll come in time, but for now the only option seems to be jailbreaking your iOS device.

Cheers,
James
Web: https://www.sparklabs.com
Support: https://www.sparklabs.com/support
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sparklabs

cudiaco

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Joined: Tue Dec 06, 2011 2:01 am

Post by cudiaco » Sun Feb 12, 2012 10:14 pm
Hi James,

Thanks for following up. I have my device (iphone 4s) jailbroken and running guizmovpn. It worked fun when it was on iOS 4.x (iphone 3gs), however nowadays the traffic seems to stall quite a lot. I'm fairly sure it's not my vpn server as my other computers can connect with no issues; both on udp and tcp type of tunnels.

I was curious if you and your team would/will be putting up a viscosity client for iphone for sale on cydia or not.

Cheers.

James

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Joined: Thu Sep 04, 2008 9:27 pm

Post by James » Tue Feb 14, 2012 4:09 am
Hi cudiaco,

A jailbreak release is certainly an option, but it's a last resort at this stage. We're still hopeful we might be able to find a way to make a version of Viscosity available on the iOS App Store (however large parts of OpenVPN will need to be completely rewritten to use the available frameworks). However to be brutally honest: it's pretty low priority for us at the moment. We still have to get Viscosity Server out the door, and we have a couple of big Viscosity-based projects we've been working on (we'll be posting more about this on our blog soon), and so it's something we'll revisit once these things are out of the way.

On a related note, Android 4 opened up its VPN frameworks, so we might look into doing an Android version. And hopefully with Google making their APIs publicly available might encourage Apple to do the same.

Cheers,
James
Web: https://www.sparklabs.com
Support: https://www.sparklabs.com/support
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sparklabs

cudiaco

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Joined: Tue Dec 06, 2011 2:01 am

Post by cudiaco » Tue Feb 14, 2012 8:14 pm
Thanks James.

Just a quick question with regards to viscosity server; will it run on all 3 major OSes (windows, osx, linux)?

Cheers.
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