Troubleshooting failed VPN connection

Question

Is there anyway to get an error log for a failed VPN connection attempt? All I get is this notification and I have no idea where to go from there:

Answer 1

What kind of VPN are you trying to establish?

Is it PPTP (Microsoft proprietary) or Cisco-compatible ?

The easiest way would be for you to run pptp (for PPTP) or vpnc (for Cisco) from a console and see the possible errors interactively.

I think that vpnc is quite straight forward, you just need to type in the necessary info (gateway ip, group name/pass, user name/pass).

I haven't actually used a PPTP VPN, but some info about setting it up can be found in the following link:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howto-configure-ubuntu-fedora-linux-pptp-client.html

Answer 2

Log is written to /var/log/syslog.
Open gnome-terminal and do tail -f /var/log/syslog This will follow the file. Now try to connect to the vpn, the messages then will start showing in the terminal.
When you are done following the log just click Ctrl+c to quit tail.