Thursday, June 7, 2012

FATAL: Pppd is not setuid-root

We've been rolling out shiny new MacBooks lately along with the SonicWALL SSL-VPN NetExtender client. Little did we know that some of the MacOS X connections were going to fail. Luckily the error message pointed the way: "FATAL: Pppd is not setuid-root and the invoking user is not root."

It seems the later versions of Mac OS X (10.6+) don't allow the setuid flag to be set on PPPD.

You can fix this by getting your bash on.

  1. Open Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal)

  2. Type: sudo chmod u+s /usr/sbin/pppd and hit Enter

  3. Type the user’s password and hit Enter

  4. Now connect and get to work :)