Connecting back home with OpenVPN

I use OpenVPN server from my router to connect back home. I imported my OpenVPN config to Pritunl and tried to connect. It fails with

Options error: --nobind doesn't make sense unless used with --remote/n

It doesn’t say much from the error message, unfortunately. Quick search yielded this post from pritunl forum. Pritunl expects a certain format for remote and silently ignores if it is not formatted as it expects. This is unfortunate because as per OpenVPN 2.5 reference manual.

Valid syntaxes:

remote host
remote host port
remote host port proto

The port and proto arguments are optional.

So, in order to fix this error, add your proto to your remote. Search for proto in your config (either tcp or udp) and append it to your remote configuration.

OpenVPN 2.6 and Ciphers

When I tried to connect with OpenVPN 2.6 via command line, then a new error emerged with deprecated options.

2023-07-05 12:18:12 OPTIONS ERROR: failed to negotiate cipher with server. Configure --data-ciphers-fallback if you want to connect to this server.
2023-07-05 12:18:12 ERROR: Failed to apply push options

To resolve that problem, replace cipher with data-ciphers-fallback in your config.

# Linux
$ sed -i 's/cipher/data-ciphers-fallback/g' vpn-config.ovpn

# Mac
$ brew install gsed
$ gsed -i 's/cipher/data-ciphers-fallback/g' vpn-config.ovpn

And you’re good to go!