PPTP VPN in Jaunty and Intrepid

**jbolivar** · May 31st, 2009

Originally Posted by area124

This has worked for me in jaunty. I had my VPN for work set up and working,
but all traffic was going though the VPN. I used the following procedure.

I used the network manager in the upper right hand corner of my desktop.
Click on "VPN Connections", then "Configure VPN..."
In the Network Connections window, select your VPN Connection and then click
the "Edit" button.
In the "Editing Your_VPN PPTP" window, click on the "IPv4 Settings" and then the "Routes..." button.
In the "Editing IPv4 routes...." window, check the box for "Use this
connection only for resources on its network".
Now click the "Add" button. Note, this kind of works a little funny. as I
added the Address/Netmask/Gateway information I had to click each box as it
seemed to loose the curser position. In my case I work address were in the
XXX.YYY.0.0 range so I used a netmask of 255.255.0.0. I set the Gateway to
my local router which is 192.168.1.1 (pretty standard). I also used the
value "1" for the Metric. I had to click the "Add" button. This was the
only way I could get it to take.

Here was another little tip. While attempting to use this GUI I ended up
with several empty routes by accident. The GUI would not let me click on
"OK" until I deleted all the empty routes. Just try clicking below your
last route. If you are able to make a selection, you have an empty route.
Just click the "Delete" button and you should be good.
Click on "OK", then "Apply", then "Close". Now test your VPN and see if
it works any better.

I use "http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/" to test my bandwidth before
and after. My connection though my work VPN is really slow. Using the
above web site very clearly indicated that all my non-work traffic was no
longer going over my work VPN.

I hope that this is helpful for some of you.
Good luck!

Thanks! This worked great for me

**pearle** · June 9th, 2009

I followed the steps suggested by area124 and it works for about 10 seconds and then I start receiving 100% packet loss over the vpn and to the internet. Anyone have any ideas?

'Ignore automatically obtained routes' is unchecked.
'Use this connection only for resources on its network' is checked.

In the routes listing I have the following:

address / netmask / gateway /metric
10.10.0.0 / 255.255.0.0 / 192.168.1.1 / 1

Again, this works perfectly for about 10 seconds but then the packet loss kicks in and nothing works.

Any suggestions?

**Lucky.** · June 10th, 2009

Hey thanks for the post. I'm using Jaunty Desktop, and this information combined with the tutorials on the PPTP client website got me up and going.

Once again for the record, I'm on Jaunty, and connecting to a Windows 2003 Server VPN.

After reading through the tutorials of configuring things manually, I got a better feel for the settings I needed in the GUI. I tried them out, and...bam, they worked! Network manager with the PPTP client worked great. Tried it a million times before to no avail. But now it works good, with no need to manually configure stuff. Weird.

My notes are as follows:

1. Add a PPTP connection with network manager.

2. When it comes to typing your username, simply type your username. Don't worry about DOMAIN\USERNAME. Just type the username.

3. For the domain name, type in the domain name. No slashes or anything crazy.

4. Click Advanced. Leave all the authentication methods checked, but uncheck EAP.

5. Check “Use Point-to-Point encryption”.

6. Connect!

7. The DNS works fine, but you need to use the fully qualified domain name to get to stuff on the VPN side. For example to remote desktop into my remote computer in the VPN LAN, in Windows XP I could just connect to "mycomputer". In Ubuntu, it's "mycomputer.mydomain.anypossibleotherstuff.bla h"

It just seems strange that all of this suddenly works now...A few things on my mind about this:

1. Following your instructions, I tweaked around a number of files in /etc/ppp while doing things manually, so perhaps these led to network manager "appearing" to be working now (since it's fixed under the hood?). I tried putting everything back the way it was, but who knows...maybe I didn't.

2. I seemed to notice issues while logged in under my normal account. I'd configure a connection, and it wouldn't work. Then I'd change stuff, and it still wouldn't work. Then I'd delete the connection altogether, but it would still appear on the drop down list (Not the configuration list, but the quick-connect list). Sometimes new connections wouldn't show up on the drop-down list. Made me wonder whether things were getting saved correctly. I've noticed some other Jaunty desktop problems that were a result of not being logged in as root, so I logged in as root to ensure my configuration changes were being saved. This seemed to work. Of course I couldn't duplicate the problem after the fact, so maybe root has nothing to do with it, and I finally just got my settings correct.

I'm going to reformat tomorrow and try these settings out with a fresh install of Jaunty. I'll report back and let you know if it all just "works" with pure GUI.

**Lucky.** · June 13th, 2009

Sorry it took a few days longer, but indeed it does work purely with network manager and no extra work. The settings I listed get the job done for a Windows 2003 Server VPN.

Yay!

**cmon** · June 27th, 2009

Originally Posted by virkang

Hi everyone,

I found a way to make it work in Jaunty (at least for me ...).
- When you configure the VPN connexion, go to the "advanced" settings"
- Uncheck "EAP" at the top
- check the "mppe" parameter
- Try to connect to your microsoft VPN server, i should work now

I hope this trick will help you out there ...

Thank you so much for this tip! I had almost lost hope of getting my vpn connection to work again

**Wtwine** · June 29th, 2009

When I go to VPN connections >Configure VPN and select the VPN connection to edit in network manager applet in Jaunty, I don't see the "Advanced settings" option everyone keeps mentioning in order to change EAP, MMPE settings etc.

WHAT AM I MISSING HERE?

**Wtwine** · July 8th, 2009

Aaaaah...following on from previous message, I was adding a new VPN connection using the "Cisco compatible" option, not PPT. Duh!

**Praill** · July 16th, 2009

Originally Posted by virkang

Hi everyone,

I found a way to make it work in Jaunty (at least for me ...).
- When you configure the VPN connexion, go to the "advanced" settings"
- Uncheck "EAP" at the top
- check the "mppe" parameter
- Try to connect to your microsoft VPN server, i should work now

I hope this trick will help you out there ...

Thanks so much this did the trick. Also for me if anyone else is

like I was: You need to make sure under the VPN tab that 'Available to all users' is NOT checked. This made weird errors for me that removed all authentication information and wouldnt connect.

I also have to agree with the above poster that stated this was just sad. A simple pptp VPN connection should NOT be hard to configure. I know pptp is an MS thing but it's still pretty common.

**zivley** · August 12th, 2009

Originally Posted by SabreWolfy

This worked for me. Use at your own risk. YMMV. Edit: See post #4 below for an important update to this post ...

I've bleated previously here and on Launchpad about how PPTP VPN worked perfectly under Hardy and was broken under Intrepid and Jaunty. For me, this was a "deal-breaker" because I need PPTP VPN access. I have not upgraded my desktop Hardy machine for this reason. I did upgrade my laptop to Intrepid and now to Jaunty and got around the problem by using PPTP VPN in a Xubuntu Hardy VirtualBox.

I've spent the evening looking at this again and I've managed to get PPTP VPN working on my Jaunty laptop. I'm not a PPTP or VPN expert by any means.

I used this post as starting point, so thanks to kryptoz. The problem as I can see it is that Network Manager 0.7 (Intrepid and Jaunty) and the associated PPTP plugin are broken. Under Hardy (Network Manager 0.6.6) everything works. There are many posts detailing the myriad problems with Network Manager 0.7. However, using the Network Manager applet is simply a front-end to calling PPTP and PPPD which actually make the connection (I think).

My solution does not involve the Network Manager applet at all. The connection is established by calling PPPD. The pptp-linux and ppp (for pppd) package must be installed and the pptpd package as well (I think).

1. Add the following to /etc/ppp/chap-secrets:

Code:

Username   PPTP   Password   *

2. Create /etc/ppp/peers/vpn1. The 'peers' folder may be owned by group 'dip' so get around that by adding yourself to the group (I have no idea if this is a good solution, but it worked). Add the following to the vpn1 file:

Code:

pty "pptp remote.gateway.address.here  --nolaunchpppd"
name Username
remotename PPTP
require-mppe-128
file /etc/ppp/options.pptp
ipparam vpn1

3. Edit the options.pptp file as required. I commented out the 'refuse-chap' and 'refuse-mschap-v2' lines.

4. Establish the VPN connection with:

Code:

sudo pppd call vpn1

or

Code:

sudo pon vpn1

5. Drop the connection when you're done with:

Code:

sudo poff vpn1

That establishes a VPN connection but I could not get any traffic through it. Therefore, create '/etc/ppp/ip-up.d/route-traffic' as follows. I don't know why the file needs to have that name or be located in that folder, because it does not appear to be executed automatically. Thanks to this site for this information:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
NET="10.0.0.0/8"
IFACE="ppp0"
route add -net ${NET} dev ${IFACE}

Make the file executable.

Replace the "10.0...." address with the range of addresses you need to access on your remote machine. For me, this was the same range as that which I originally included when setting the VPN up in Hardy. It may look like "10.2.0.0/16" for example. The values don't have to be in the "10" range (mine were not).

So, to get the VPN up in Jaunty, I did the following (in /etc/ppp/ip-up.d):

Code:

sudo pon vpn1
sudo ./route-traffic

Edit: See post #4 below for an important update to this post ...

Thanks a lot to sabrewolfy for this nice solution, I've got it working fine ONLY after I used this method, all the other methods I've found around didn't get me connected to my MS VPN until I tried this one!

I allowed myself to improve it a little bit adding some more custom stuff for it to be easier to work, always following the example given on the original howto.

For a person like me, that has a lot of routings to be set to the VPN connection it can be a little tedious to do NET1, NET2, NET3 .... NET20!
and then a command for each one, so I used an array where all I need is to put every net I want to route, and to change it is as simple as adding or removing a line from the array, always keeping the same format.
So here's the routing script
This is the routing script I've wrote
Create '/etc/ppp/ip-up.d/route-traffic'

Code:

gksu gedit /etc/ppp/ip-up.d/route-traffic

Paste this code and save the file

Code:

#!/bin/bash
IFACE="ppp0"
NETWORKS=(
"10.1.0.0/24"
"10.2.0.0/24"
"10.3.0.0/24"
"192.168.123.0/24"
)

for NET in "${NETWORKS[@]}"
do
  route add -net $NET dev $IFACE
done

exit 0

Make it executable

Code:

sudo chmod +x /etc/ppp/ip-up.d/route-traffic

I've also created a "on/off toggle" script that will connect to the VPN if is disconnected and disconnect if connected.
Create the file '/usr/local/bin/vpn1'

Code:

gksu gedit /usr/local/bin/vpn1

Paste the following code and save the file

Code:

#!/bin/bash

VPN=vpn1

if [ ! "$(pidof pppd)" ]
then
  sudo pon $VPN
  zenity --info --text="Connected to $VPN" --no-wrap
else
  sudo poff $VPN
  zenity --info --text="Disconnected from $VPN" --no-wrap
fi

Make it executable

Code: