Is the Starting Point ovpn down?

I tried to start the Starting Point challenge yesterday (yes, I’m a newb, please be nice), and nmap was working fine with no problems at all, but I had to stop halfway through because I was just too tired (lol).

Now I’ve repeated all the same steps and commands, verbatim, about 20 times, but I keep getting the ‘port specifications illegal’ error.

When you run openvpn with your ovpn file, what is the final message it gives you?

It changes every few minutes; it often has to restart. Should I just try again tomorrow and see if I can get it more stable?

I’d be tempted to try now.

Check the openvpn connection, check your network connection that it is running on and keep an eye on what IP address it assigns you.

The “Port Specifications Illegal” error is from nmap isn’t it?

Have you tried running a basic scan rather than the two step scan (for example: nmap -Pn -A IPADDRESS) just to see?

I did already attempt that, but it said it scanned all ports and found 0 hosts. Thanks for your help by the way :slight_smile:

OK, so try to identify what error message is coming from what tool and what causes that message.

If the OpenVPN isn’t initiating a connection, then nothing will work. You can try downloading a new connection pack and double checking the internet connection from the VPN.

If its just NMAP saying “invalid ports”, chances are something in the scan is broken.