OpenVPN on Ubuntu 18.10

I thought configuring OpenVPN on ubuntu would be automatic but turns out there are some things that you need ot watch out for.

I recently setup an OpenVPN server and decided to configure my laptop (running Pop OS/Ubuntu 18.10). It seems that while PPTP is supported out of the box, for openvpn a couple of packages need to be installed.

sudo apt install network-manager-openvpn-gnome
sudo service network-manager restart

This enabled the OpenVPN client.ovpn file to be imported using the network manager. However I was still getting an error

Invalid VPN service type (cannot find authentication binary)

Quick googling led to this site. So edit the /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/… file as advised.

One deviation is that I did not need to put quotes around the password. In fact adding quotes gave authentication failures instead.

Written on February 23, 2019