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HappyDeveloper
Asked: 2012-06-23 08:28:37 +0800 CST

How to connect to VPN from the command line in Linux?

  • 772

I have different tunnels that I configured using the network manager GUI.

When I login to my desktop, I'm connected to the internet without any tunnels. To connect to a tunnel, I usually click on the network manager tray icon > VPN connections > Some VPN

I need that done automatically on startup, so I need to know how to do that in the cli.

It would also be nice if I could make sure that no application connects to the internet before the connection is tunneled.

Any ideas?

I'm using Ubuntu 12 and openvpn.

linux openvpn networkmanager

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You should have nmcli in that version

    nmcli con list

    That will list connections you have setup. Find the VPN one

    nmcli con up uuid <uuid>
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  2. This is what the OpenVPN HOWTO says: "If you install OpenVPN via an RPM package on Linux, the installer will set up an initscript. When executed, the initscript will scan for .conf configuration files in /etc/openvpn, and if found, will start up a separate OpenVPN daemon for each file.". Ubuntu is derived from Debian, and may have a different structure.

    Check in /etc/openvpn if you have that dir and .conf files, then if you have in /etc/rc5.d/ a link to the initscript. To check if the tunnel is up, you may ping the other side of the vpn.

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