up vote 15 down vote favorite
1

I have installed 12.04 and setting up the OpenVPN via network manager. the network-manager-openvpn-gnome is installed, and I can open "configure VPN..." and see "Add VPN", however I can not save my settings. The "Save.." button is gray and "Apply to all users" is selected and gray too.

Is this a bug ?

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1  
I can't save my configuration either. I followed this tutorial and the save button was never enabled. ubuntugeek.com/… Any suggestions? – pllee Jun 5 '12 at 2:54
up vote 7 down vote

One solution is to start:

nm-connection-editor

in the terminal. Terminal messages will tell you which entries of the connection are considered as invalid.

Source: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager-openvpn/+bug/990765/comments/27

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1  
Well, that was interesting. On Ubuntu 14.04, leaving CA Certificate blank was valid; at some point since then (I upgraded straight to 16.04) a "No CA certificate is required" checkbox was added, that I never noticed, and I hadn't been able to edit the connection because it wasn't checked. – Izkata Feb 7 '17 at 15:10
    
When started from the GUI, grep 'Cannot save connection' /var/log/syslog should also show the problem – mivk May 1 '17 at 10:00
up vote 4 down vote

Read this thread. The problem originates from the security policy implemented in Ubuntu. You will be required to change this as described in the displayed thread.

The file is /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.policy, edit it with:

sudo -H gedit /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.policy

You need to change the action:

<action id="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.settings.modify.own">
.
.
.
<allow_inactive>no</allow_inactive>

to read

<allow_inactive>auth_admin</allow_inactive>

or

<allow_inactive>yes</allow_inactive>

logout to activate.

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4  
Sounded good, this didn't work for me though. – Evan Carroll Oct 3 '12 at 7:50
up vote 3 down vote

As Enrique said in this post: https://askubuntu.com/a/143491/98277

Make sure these fields are populated:
    User Certificate
    CA certificate
    Private Key

Your Save button will work then.
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Please note that the Network Manager applet doesn't support embedded certs in the .ovpn config file. So extract all <ca>BEGIN...</ca> and keys to dedicated .crt files, which you can link using ca /path/to/ca.crt and cert /path/to/id.crt etc. – Benoit Duffez Dec 21 '16 at 9:52
up vote 0 down vote

Are you sure you need exactly OpenVPN? In case you need to have vpn connection only with login and password (no certificate needed) try using PPTP.

sudo apt-get install network-manager-pptp
sudo network-manager restart

Click to NetworkManager -> Configure VPN -> +Add -> Point-To-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) in VPN section.

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up vote 0 down vote

I had the same issue on Ubuntu Mate 16.10

Turns out it wouldn't work while connected from a Windows PC through xRDP. I tried it on the box locally and I was able to save the OpenVPN configuration and managed to connect.

TLDR: Disconnect from xRDP and try to save it locally

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