Unexpected behavior during unexpected disconnect

[AJ Nervo]

With these two settings:

"On unexpected disconnect: disable network access"

"Keep connected" - unchecked

...during an unexpected disconnect, shouldn't Tunnelblick disable the network and then just sit quietly until I manually intervene in some way? What is actually happening is it disables the network as expected but then also tries to reconnect anyway and in doing so locks itself up so hard that my only recourse is force quitting from Activity Monitor. I'm not sure why it keeps trying to reconnect like that (seemingly very contrary to unchecking the "Keep connected" setting?).

[Tunnelblick developer]

"Keep Connected" does not prevent OpenVPN from trying to reconnect.

From the hover help for the "Keep connected" setting:

     When checked, if OpenVPN exits unexpectedly (crashes), Tunnelblick will attempt to connect the VPN again.

     When not checked, Tunnelblick will not try to connect the VPN if OpenVPN exits unexpectedly.

What you describe isn't Tunnelblick trying to reconnect, it is OpenVPN trying to reconnect. I'm not sure how to prevent OpenVPN from doing that, but if there is a way I don't know what that is, and it may work only for certain situations. Consult OpenVPN experts about that.

Tunnelblick will lock up if/when OpenVPN is trying to connect thousands of times per second because Tunnelblick is trying to keep up with OpenVPN's log. If you disable logging, the lockup may not happen.

[AJ Nervo]

Thank you for taking the time to reply - I appreciate that very much. I saw the hover help but was probably confusing the OpenVPN process with Tunnelblick's...much clearer now, thanks! I tried disabling logging but that doesn't seem to have affected the lockup (using latest beta).

Is the 'kill switch' causing OpenVPN's connection retries to freak out? During these disconnects, I never (or almost never?) see the option from the menu to re-enable the network, for what it's worth (so for me, there's no way to recover from this situation within Tunnelblick - I can only force quit). When I force quit and restart Tunnelblick, I then see that option show up in the menu.

Anyway, I'll keep living with the force quit situation, but it does seem odd to me that there's no way to wrangle that kill switch/reconnect dynamic.

Thanks again! 

[Tunnelblick developer]

Yes, it is quite possible that the kill switch is causing OpenVPN to try to reconnect repeatedly in a tight loop.

But by itself that shouldn't cause Tunnelblick to hang, so I suspect something else is happening.

The next time the hang happens, please highlight Tunnelblick in Activity Monitor and post the output of "Sample Process" (or send it to. devel...@tunnelblick.net, if you prefer).