Pritunl Client: Unable to communicate with helper service, try restarting

Question

Can't run Pritunl client anymore. It just keeps showing the same error on my Mac.

Error: Unable to communicate with helper service, try restarting

OS X: El Capitan 10.11.6

Tried restarting and re-installing the app.

The app used to work, not sure when it stopped working as I update most updates which come up in app store.

Has anyone experienced this before? Any suggestions on the solution are appreciated.

Jaella

Answer 1

After some researching I couldn't find anything useful to resolve the issue but I was sure there was a process which was conflicting with functionality of this client. I decided to Quit applications through Activity Monitor one by one. I quitted two or three known to me applications before stumbling upon a service which didn't take up much memory or CPU resources, called helpd. After quitting that application Pritunl Client started without any issues.

Jaella

In my case, quiting the pritunl-service did the trick, but your answer pointed me to the right direction, thanks! – Debate

@SandipNirmal what is not working? what have you tried? – Jaella

I tried both the options mentioned above quitting helpd and quitting pritunl-service. But none of these worked for me. I even tried viscosity, it works but it gets disconnected every 10-15 seconds. I am using macOS Seirra and latest pritnl-client v1.0.1311.6. – Applejack

@SandipNirmal I'm on Sierra as well with client 1.0.12.. and everything is working just fine. I wonder what else it could be. – Jaella

Not sure, trying from last few days. It connects for 10-15 secs and then gets disconnected. Whereas it works fine with Ubuntu machine with same .ovpn file. – Applejack

Answer 2

What worked for me:

echo "127.0.0.1 localhost" >> /etc/hosts

and then restart

(I had cleaned /etc/hosts previously and it became a problem)

Prelusive

Answer 3

Started seeing this error today, out of nowhere. What I did was download the latest version from pritunl website and did and UPGRADE of the currently installed version (UPGRADE and not uninstall and reinstall.) and it started working fine.

macOS: Ventura 13.4

Impearl