VPN Client for SSLVPN

My workplace has a VPN available for working from home and recommends using Fortinet VPN client. From my experience, there are a few things that make Fortinet a less-than-ideal experience. So I went looking for an alternative.

What’s wrong with Fortinet VPN client?

There are two things that I found frustrating with the Fortinet VPN client.

1. It has no way to save your credentials or integrate with a password manager, so every time I need the VPN I need to go grab my username and password.

2. I personally found it to disconnect frequently. It isn’t obvious that is disconnects, so things stop working and it takes a minute to figure out what’s going wrong. Oh yeah, then go grab the credentials again so I can reconnect…

What’s the alternative?

What I found was openfortivpn.

It is easy to install:

brew install openfortivpn

Add you can run it right from the command line:

sudo openfortivpn $REMOTE_GATEWAY:$PORT "--username=$USERNAME" "--pinentry=pinentry-mac"

Pinentry uses keychain to store your credentials.

Why not use the native VPN client in macOS?

I intially tried to use the native client, but it seems it does not support SSLVPN.