Gnome and OpenVPN

In this short blog post, I would like to describe the problems and workarounds I did, to get OpenVPN working with the Gnome VPN Manager.

Normally I use the OpenVPN client for a VPN, but this time I decided (because I was using Gnome) to use the built-in VPN manager of Gnome. However, I encountered a few problems:

When you try to import the .opvn file, you get an error message saying “Error: the plugin does not support import capability”. Because Gnome Network Manager does not support OpenVPN out of the box.

• You need to install the OpenVPN plugin for the network manager by:

  1	sudo apt install network-manager-openvpn-gnome

• After installation of the plugin, I still got the same error message. But I could import it over the shell with (replace the filename with yours):

  1	sudo nmcli connection import type openvpn file <filename>

• But the import was still not successful. It was failing on a line with “route”. The route remote_host 255.255.255.255 net_gateway default. That seems to be a common problem.

  I just commented it out with #. Like: # route remote_host 255.255.255.255 net_gateway

• I could finally import the OpenVPN configuration. But I could not enable it. The slider went directly back to “off”.

  I could solve it by set the Password to Store the password for all users.