./cmsimike » vpn

Enabling Internet Access on Ubuntu with an Active VPN, and Slow Internet Problems

Mike — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:11:06 +0000

This is just a quick follow up to my previous post about connecting to a Windows VPN (pptp) from Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). Using the tip from lloles that was left in the comments, I managed to go to this post on the Ubuntu forums dealing with configuring routing for the VPN. Thankfully, it has worked. However by doing this, I’ve run into another problem. Insteading of pasting my entire problem here, I will link to the post dealing with my Internet being very slow after I connect to a windows VPN server. It’s such a weird problem. I haven’t looked much into it, but I’m just so confused. Hopefully I will have some sort of good news to report once I figure things out.

Connect to a Windows VPN (pptp) from Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)

Mike — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 02:30:51 +0000

Back in April, I wrote a post about how to connecct your Ubuntu box to a Windows VPN server linking back to another person’s blog explaining the setup. The install itself was pretty bumpy, but ultimately worked. If I recall correctly, the information in that post was mainly for Gutsy Gibbon. After upgrading to Hardy Haron, I was never able to get the VPN working again. I kind of left it like that. Now that I’ve installed Intrepid Ibex, I started working on trying to get VPN to work again. And thankfully after a few hours of work, I got it working in Gnome. I make no assurances that this will work with KDE or any other enviornment. Here is the process.

Assumptions:

Connecting to a Windows Server 2003-based VPN with a domain configured with defaults
Short/Friendly Authentication Domain Name: XXCompany
Username: usera
password: passworda
VPN host: vpn.example.com

If you click on your network icon -> VPN connections -> Configure VPN, you would expect to be able to click add and start filling in information. From a new, vanilla installation the Add box will be grayed out. This is because a VPN manager has yet to be installed. Open a Terminal and type in

sudo apt-get install network-manager-pptp

If you get a message saying “E: Couldn’t find package network-manager-pptp” you may need to enable more repository locations. Once that package, and any related packages are installed, restart your computer. Then, you’ll be happy to see that the Add button under Configure VPN is now activated.

Click the Add button and for a Windows VPN, leave the server type as PPTP:

VPN Connection Type

Clicking create brings you to the next screen in which you define your VPN credentials.

VPN Connection Information

The Gateway is your VPN host. For username, I’ve only got authentication working when the domain name is added to your username in the tradional Windows domain format (\). There may be a different name for that format, but most corporate users should understand that notation. Obviously the show password doesn’t need to be clicked, but for the sake of completeness, I included where the password should go. You can also leave the Password field blank and just enter it every time you start the VPN Connection. I’m sure that this is much more secure. Leave the NT Domain field empty.

Lastly clicking the Advanced will get you to this following screen:

PPTP Advanced Screen

Make sure to uncheck PAP under Authentication Methods as well as check “Use Point-to-Point encryption.”

If everything has gone well, then you should be able to save all your changes and start the VPN up and have it connect. A little lock icon will appear on your connection indicating that a secure VPN connection has been made.

Keep in mind that this method forces all traffic to be tunneled to the VPN host, which means that in the base case, your internet will stop working until you disconnect from the VPN. There must be a way around this, but I have yet to come across it. Enabling the VPN changes your computer’s route table. There is an option under “IPv4 Settings” -> “Routes” that ignore automatically obtained routes, but that doesn’t help in this case, nor is it what we want (I don’t think). If you happen to get an error while attempting to connect to your VPN host, open a terminal and issue this command and watch the log of the attempted VPN connection.

tail -f /var/log/syslog

This proved invaluable to me while trying to configure my VPN client.
More information regarding setting up a VPN client within Ubuntu can be located on Launchpad article about VPNCLients.

Connect Ubuntu to a Windows-based VPN

Mike — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 01:19:05 +0000

Now one of my biggest problems with having any GNU/Linux-based operating system is that, for work purposes, I need to connect to a Windows-based VPN (Windows Server 2003). About a year and a half of on again and off again searching lead me to many dead ends. That is until I found Happy Linux Thoughts and the post about using network-manager-pptp called connecting to a Windows VPN server with Debian-based distros a few weeks ago. I was going to reiterate the steps, but I doubt I’d do a good of job as the author.

One problem I ran into is that, after adding the new VPN connection, it did not appear as a connection once I was done (at least with Ubuntu 7.10). I tried to add and delete it multiple times, however it was as far as I could tell impossible to connect to. So in my frustration I shut down my laptop. As the fates would have it, my desktop system would crash a day later, causing me to have to use my laptop until my desktop was up and running. I decided that I might as well play with the connections again and see if I can get it working. Luckily for me the connection was just there. I was able to connect to my work VPN and RDC to my computer at work. It is pretty amazing.

The only other problem encountered (though not a problem, but more of an annoyance) is that once connected to the VPN, the internet on the local machine dies out. I bet that it is because of security (modeled after Cisco’s VPN client) rather than stupidity (modeled after Windows’ “Use gateway on remote machine” checkbox) that this choice was made.. I am not sure if it is just the internet or all networking as I didn’t test connecting to another computer on my home network, but I guess that will force me to work when I should be working. As of this writing I haven’t played around with the VPN connection anymore other than the initial 20 or so minutes trying to get local internet up and running again.