Openvpn server doesn't start

**ksylian** · December 7th, 2012

Hi,

I'm not an expert user but trying to run a vpn server on Ubuntu.
I followed this tutorial https://help.ubuntu.com/11.10/serverguide/openvpn.html
and installation went well but the openvpn server doesn't start. I get this error:

# /etc/init.d/openvpn start

* Starting virtual private network daemon(s)...
* Autostarting VPN 'server' S
IOCSIFADDR: No such device
: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
SIOCSIFDSTADDR: No such device
: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
SIOCSIFMTU: No such device

# /etc/init.d/openvpn status
* VPN 'server' is not running

It seems that tun interface isn't created but I'm not sure.
Can anyone help, please?

Thanks

**SeijiSensei** · December 7th, 2012

Add "dev tun" to the top of the OpenVPN configuration file and see if it helps.

**ksylian** · December 7th, 2012

dev tun was uncommented

**SeijiSensei** · December 7th, 2012

What do you seen in /var/log/syslog? For instance in this discussion, the problem was that it wanted to create the tun device in /dev/net/tun, but there was no such directory or device. However, I just installed OpenVPN from the repositories (with "sudo apt-get install openvpn"), and see this:

Code:

root@vid:/# ls /dev/net -l
total 0
crw-rw-rwT 1 root root 10, 200 Nov 26 13:27 tun

Did you install the repository version or install it some other way? The repository version has always worked for me.

**ksylian** · December 8th, 2012

# ls /dev/net -l
ls: cannot access /dev/net: No such file or directory

I re-installed openvpn from the repositories and it didn't help.

Apparently, there isn't a tun device on my OS.
I just found out that this is due to kernel not installed properly.

**sulliwane** · June 20th, 2013

Here what solved my problem :

Code:

# mkdir /dev/net 
# mknod /dev/net/tun c 10 200  
# chmod 666 /dev/net/tun

And here is the problem I had (syslog also complained about directory net that doesn't exist)

Code:

service openvpn start
 * Starting virtual private network daemon(s)...                                         *   Autostarting VPN 'server'                                                          SIOCSIFADDR: No such device
: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
SIOCSIFDSTADDR: No such device
: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
SIOCSIFMTU: No such device