Re: OpenVPN

[cletusjenkins <cletusjenkins@zoho.com>]

 > On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 02:06:17AM -0700, cletusjenkins wrote: 
 > > I'm trying to connect to a VPN service via openVPN. When I try to connect (via network manager's gui) I get an error saying the openvpn service is not running. I do not see any errors in messages, syslog, daemon.log or dmesg about this. When I manually start the service it just says that it is starting, but nothing else. However running ps -ef shows no new processes. Stopping the openvpn service makes no difference in the process list either. I've restarted network-manager and even rebooted to ensure everything is loading properly, but to no avail. 
 > >  
 > > To get to my current state i installed: 
 > >  
 > > sudo apt-get install openvpn network-manager-openvpn network-manager-openvpn-gnome 
 > >  
 > > I created the VPN connection with the instructions from the VPN service, but since I can't get the OpenVPN software to even run I don't know what help they can provide. 
 >  
 > Try adding the following lines to your server's vpn *.conf file: 
 >  
 > verb 3 
 > log-append /tmp/openvpn.log 
 >  
 > and restart the openvpn service. If the file doesn't appear then you may 
 > have a syntax error in your config. If the file does appear, check it 
 > for errors. 
 >  

I don't quite follow what you are advising me. I don't have any vpn *.conf file at least not in /etc/, I'm not running a vpn server, I'm just trying to connect to an existing vpn server outside of my control. When I try to connect to the VPN, it says the connection fails because the openvpn service isn't running. I've tried running a dpkg-reconfigure on openvpn, but it doesn't ask for any configuration options from me, so whatever it sets up must be vanilla default settings. From the error message I thought the openvpn service would need to be running to support my outward connection, but wouldn't need any local configuration (other than the VPN certificate and settings I got from the company I signed up, which I entered into the network-manager's VPN gui).

(Oh, and BTW this is all on stable)