OpenVPN-Support

This package adds OpenVPN support to NetworkManager. It is based on the CVS version, see the date in the file name to see if it suits your version.
I propose this package for inclusion upstream and for integration into the NetworkManager CVS repository.

Installation of OpenVPN-Support

Make sure that you have vpnc support in your NetworkManager to see if you have VPN-support at all! Get this working before you try this since this is a stable configuration. You do not need to get a vpnc connection going but make sure that you can configure such a connection and the appropriate menu entries are there! Install a recent version of NetworkManager for example from CVS. On FC4 it is sufficient to grab all the needed packages from Rawhide, rebuild and install them (dbus, hal, NetworkManager, NetworkManager-vpnc for testing, maybe others that I don't remember). Not that this can result in unstable behaviour. For now this is only recommended for testing until this package hopefully made it into NetworkManager upstream. Afterwards go to your checked-out CVS version (see NetworkManager developers page for instructions) and unpack the tar file. Then

cd vpn-daemons/openvpn
./autogen.sh
./configure [appropriate options]
make
su
make install

The [appropriate options] above in most cases will be something like --sysconfdir=/etc --prefix=/usr. Check your distro-specific settings.
After compiling and installing restart the NetworkManager and nm-applet. Since you made sure before that vpnc is working you should now be able to choose to create an OpenVPN connection. Right now only the X.509 mode is supported. It assumes that you followed the OpenVPN 2.0 HOWTO to create the appropriate infrastructure. This especially means the nsCertType flag which is set by build-server-cert. The module passes "--ns-cert-type server" flag to OpenVPN as a mean against MITM attacks (see note about man-in-the-middle attacks). Note: The password dialog that comes up has no function at this time but nether the less you need to supply matchine passwords (just on character is enough). See To Do why this code is still in there.
This plug-in supports pushing DNS and WINS information to the clients via the push "dhcp-option DNS 10.9.0.1" and push "dhcp-option WINS 10.8.0.1" options in the OpenVPN server config. Have fun!

Download

NetworkManager OpenVPN package is released and distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
By downloading and/or using the software you agree to this license!
This software is based on the NetworkManager vpnc package from the NetworkManager distribution which is released under the same license.

The NetworkManager OpenVPN integration can now be found in the NetworkManager CVS module in the Gnome CVS repository.

I have built packages for Fedora Core. Download the SRPM and rebuild it with rpmbuild --rebuild NetworkManager-openvpn-0.3-1.src.rpm. I'm working on getting it into Fedora Extras.
NetworkManager-openvpn-0.3.1-1.src.rpm (spec)

Server Configurations

I have setup a short wiki page that describes some basic example setups.

To Do

• Find out if there is a central possibility to store certificates in Gnome.
• Unify the code of VPN plugins. there is quiet some code that both implementations share and that should be merged into a VPN utility module