Can I share a VPN connection on Mac?

If you connect to your Mac and a client machine on the same network, the Mac acts as a router between the two networks. Can I share the VPN connection with the Mac so that the VPN is created when the client connects to my Mac rather than the VPN provider's Mac server? Yes. A virtual private network (VPN) connection can be shared between two Macs as long as both of them are connected to a router.

Mac OS X does not require that your router support any particular type of VPN functionality. For example, I have Mac OS X 10.5 and an Asus AC1200 wireless router that works fine with OpenVPN 2. If I connect to a VPN (which is also supported by my ASUS router), then I am able to reach other computers on the same wireless network at the Internet as well as computers connected to the VPN (and using OpenVPN as their VPN client).

The way this works is that I use the Mac's built in configuration utility to setup an OpenVPN connection between the Mac and the router. This is configured from the router, not by me.

After it is established, I can share it with other computers and use that connection as my virtual private network (VPN). The only problem with this is that if the VPN goes down and I need to establish a new connection, I need to reset it, which is annoying. It would be nice to have it as an option to use when connecting to other machines. But for most situations, it works great.

How do I setup a VPN hotspot on my Mac?

I really don't know where to start.

I would like to setup my own VPN hotspot on a MacBook, with some form of server behind it. But no matter what tutorials/guides I have read, they don't work. When I first start up my laptop, the settings window appears (as it should) but every time I try to enable a VPN tunnel it fails with the message: Failed to allocate memory for key buffer - check the host name. It's not clear how I go about fixing this issue. Is there a "right" way to set up a VPN hotspot on a Mac?

Use OpenVPN, but be sure to update the configuration on the server when your Mac moves away. That way you won't suffer from that message.