Re: OpenVPN

[cletusjenkins <cletusjenkins@zoho.com>]

-- clet
debian is my main squeeze


---- On Thu, 30 Aug 2012 12:42:15 -0700 Joe<joe@jretrading.com> wrote ---- 

 > On Thu, 30 Aug 2012 20:41:00 +0200 
 > Registros Web <registros.web@gmail.com> wrote: 
 >  
 > Network Manager can handle most OpenVPN configuration options, and is 
 > a viable alternative to using a command-line invocation with a 
 > configuration file. As long as you don't get too exotic, and the 
 > server admin is aware of the NM plugin's current limitations. I use NM 
 > on Ubuntu 10 to connect to an OpenVPN server on Squeeze. 
 >  
 > Assuming the OP has been given the correct configuration details to be 
 > used with NM, I think this problem is likely to be caused by a network 
 > blockage of some kind, possibly a workstation firewall, or even a 
 > misspelled URL. As long as the client can see the server, which appears 
 > not to be the case here, some sort of useful error message should be 
 > produced, not just 'I can't see it'. 
 >  
 > --  
 > Joe 

thanks for the reply. This is what I sort of assumed (sorry, I didn't really know anything about openvpn before trying to set this up), but the weird thing is when I try to connect to the VPN via the gui, immediately it comes back with a failure, complaining about the openvpn service not running. It doesn't take a second to grind on DNS or anything, just immediately it comes back with a failure message. When I tail the log file I setup, and start openvpn with the conf file, it takes a good 20-30 seconds to go through the process.

One unusual thing I noticed is if I just do a generic "/etc/init.d/openvpn start", the service now starts and keeps running (still not working, but it did ask for my vpn user and password), but if I start it by specifying the conf file directly with "openvpn /etc/openvpn/<company-name>.conf" it goes through the same motions, but then the service terminates right away. If I try to start the vpn settings in the network-manager gui after starting it via init.d I get zero error messages, but also doesn't work. Thanks.