Today I see that my "Configure VPN..." part is greyed out and I have been using several PPTP VPN connections so far and today suddenly this seems to be inactive.

I did the changes in the network manager policy, changes which are mentioned in: gray button for saving "editing VPN connection" in Ubuntu 12.04

I also tried:

sudo apt-get install network-manager-pptp
sudo network-manager restart

But the "Configure VPN..." is still greyed out so I cannot configure my existing VPNs.

I have Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. If I upgrade to 14.04, will it work again?

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2 Answers

I'm hitting the same problem on 2 different 12.04 desktop machines. I'm pretty sure the problem got introduced with the following update that came in on 2/2/2015

BTW, you can still access the configure side of the VPN by running the "nm-connection-editor" from terminal session.

I don't know why they killed the applet selections for "Configure" and "Disconnect" VPN in the latest update. The change log didn't say anything about that

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Network Manager VPN support is based on a plug-in system.

The network-manager-pptp plugin is installed by default.

For OpenVPN, install these packages:

sudo apt-get install network-manager-openvpn network-manager-openvpn-gnome

Then restart your network-manager:

sudo systemctl restart network-manager

Open the Network connections program. Click on Add. Select PPTP (or OpenVPN) under the VPN section. Fill in your settings and save.

Eventually, you should be able to select a VPN config in the previously greyed out zone.

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