Openvpn, Avahi, Ichat, Bonjour – help getting this to work together

[anagama]

I would like to be able to use iChat via Bonjour when I VPN into my office.

I have pfsense 1.2.3 installed on a PC, installed Avahi from the packages, and opened all the ports specified here:  http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1507?viewlocale=en_US

For one brief moment, I was able to be seen on the LAN when connected to the VPN in the iChat Bonjour List, though I could see nobody on the LAN in my list.  I've fiddled with my domain name in pfsense, variously using "local" and "alocal".  I don't know if Avahi is running correctly, my logs show this:

iface.c: avahi_server_add_service() failed: Not supported

Googling says this means I need to set the domain to "local", but my googling also says that setting this to "local" conflicts with the macs on my LAN.  Tried it both ways and not having luck.

Also, ssh and sftp-ssh Avahi services fail.  I don't really need either of these services, but perhaps it is symptomatic?

Anyway, I've read that people have succeeded in getting iChat to work over VPN – but I haven't found a tutorial that sort of hand-holds one through this.  Can anyone point me in the right direction?  It would be most appreciated.

[jimp]

The error about services failing is normal and doesn't mean there are problems.

I haven't heard of anyone getting this to work with a remote access client, but I have got it to work fine when using a pfSense box running Avahi on each end of an OpenVPN tunnel. I can see Bonjour users on both ends of the tunnel in Pidgin.