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Showing posts with label manager. Show all posts
Showing posts with label manager. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Working out OpenVPN with Network Manager in Lucid Lynx

For two years now, I've used OpenVPN to connect to a server where I upload some of the stuff I work on. Until now I always started OpenVPN from the terminal, because I didn't manage to get it working from the Network Manager in the last 4 Ubuntu versions.
Last weekend, I had some spare time and I installed Lucid Lynx on my laptop. I tried (again) to get OpenVPN working with Network Manager. As usually it failed, although I was pretty sure everything I did was correct.
So I decided to import my existing openvpn configuration file and export it back to see if there's something different. After doing this, I've noticed a few difference, but most of them were just due to syntax. However, two lines looked more interesting:

user openvpn
group openvpn
I've checked and saw that with these lines in the configuration file, the openvpn connection failed to start even from the terminal. Therefore, I did the following:
  1. create the openvpn group as a system group using

    groupadd -r openvpn
  2. assign the openvpn group to the directory (and files) that holds my openvpn key and certificates (mine and server's):

    chgrp -R openvpn openvpn_folder
  3. assign group read permissions to the openvpn settings directory and remove permissions for others:

    chmod g+r,o-rwx openvpn_folder
After these steps, the OpenVPN connection started from the Network Manager without problems (note that it's recommended route only traffic for that network through that connection).