Recently for a project I’ve been working on at the office I had to set up a VPN connection to gain access to the client’s network. They already had vpn set up on their end (thankfully) however, oddly enough I didn’t have a vpn client. I noticed that the gnome Network Manager had a tab for VPN, however the add button was disabled. After a quick google, I found out that you just have to install the packages ‘network-manager-pptp’ and ‘pptp-linux’ to enable it.
sudo apt-get install network-manager-pptp pptp-linux |
Did the trick and now it was just a matter of entering the server information, username, password. At this point I was still unable to connect to the network. I double and triple checked my info and it was all right. It turned out I had to enable Point to Point Encryption (makes sense) in the advanced section.
Now, I have a nice little ‘locked’ icon on my network status bar.
VPN Connection in Network Manager
Who knew it would be that easy?
Tags: linux, security, system admin
When I tried this on my Dell Mini 10v running Ubuntu NBR it decided to remove the installed network-manger and tried to then install the network-manager-pptp at which point it failed, leaving me with no obvious means of reinstalling the old network-manager as I now had no internet connection! I eventually overcame this, by connection via LAN to my router and eventually got a network connection back when I was able to do reinstall of n-m. At the moment I’m trying KVpnc instead.