This afternoon, I was trying to establish an SSL VPN tunnel to work via the SonicWALL NetExtender client on my MacBook Air running OS X 10.6.8. Instead of connecting, it spat out the following error:

FATAL: You don't have permission to read/execute '/etc/ppp/peers'

The problem occurred after installing the “Security Update 2012-001″ update.

Looking at /etc/ppp, I noticed that the directory listing looked like:

d--------- 16 root wheel 544 Sep 7 18:00 ppp

So, I changed the permissions on that directory so that it would be world readable and executable with the following command:

sudo chmod ugo+rx /etc/ppp

Even with that change, it wasn’t enough as the error persisted. I then checked the directory listing for /etc/ppp/peers and it looked like:

d--------- 5 root wheel 170 Feb 23 11:28 peers

Changing the permissions to match that of its parent directory, by running the following fixed the problem.

sudo chmod ugo+rx /etc/ppp/peers

Thankfully, that was pretty simple to fix.