VPN is not supported

[K900]

VPN support is a must have for 90% of Ubuntu users in Russia and other CIS countries

[Kalle Valo (kvalo)]

Thank you for the bug report. Currently connman only supports openconnect as VPN method but nothing else. Also in Network Menu VPN is not implemented yet.

Can you provide more information about this, please? What specific VPN method(s) are needed? Also in what cases are they needed? Links about this would be really great. They can be in russian, I can always try to use translators to read them.

[K900 (k0009000)]

The most important methods are PPTP and L2TP. From what I know they're used by at least 4 providers here in Samara, and that's about half of the city's internet users. I can't give you exact links that mention PPTP or L2TP but you can for example take a look at Beeline's site at internet.beeline.ru (just to see that they've got a good number of users). They have networks all over Russia and use PPTP in most of the cities and L2TP in Moscow and AFAIK St.Petersburg. So VPN is a must have for all Russian users. And yes, why not use pptp-linux like NM does?

[IC Raibow (icrbow)]

PPPoE is also very common.

[Kireytsev Victor (spyfzm)]

pptp and l2tp is major types of internet connaction in russia, vpn must have

[Konstantin Stepanov (milezv)]

I third this request. Most domestic networks here in Minsk, Belarus, use VPN PP2P connection to ISP.
Every time I install Ubuntu from scratch I have to find some PC with network connection to download pptp-linux package
in order to install into fresh Ubuntu installation so I can setup Internet connection.

[Vladimir Tartynskyi (fon.vosi)]

pptp, L2TP, pppoe are also major types of connection in Ukraine

[Yuriy Vidineev (adeptg)]

Nearly 100% internet connection in Russia is PPPoE, PPTP or L2TP

[K900 (k0009000)]

Any news here?

[Kalle Valo (kvalo)]

No news, I haven't worked on this yet and no progress in upstream either.

[Nikita Vetoshkin (nikita-vetoshkin)]

I assume that a new plugin for connman must be implemented and corresponding feature added to indicator-network? Is it right?

Kalle, could you please write a sort of guideline: what doors can we knock, where else can we ask or, perhaps, where someone can start implementing this feature?

[Kalle Valo (kvalo)]

Nikita Vetoshkin <email address hidden> writes:

> I assume that a new plugin for connman must be implemented and
> corresponding feature added to indicator-network? Is it right?

Yes, this is correct.

> Kalle, could you please write a sort of guideline: what doors can we
> knock, where else can we ask or, perhaps, where someone can start
> implementing this feature?

For connman we need a plugin for each VPN method. Here's the openconnect
pluging which is in connman:

http://git.kernel.org/?p=network/connman/connman.git;a=blob;f=plugins/openconnect.c;h=2ddb9046ef2a5f894412819ab36bb71d0e1d7a96;hb=HEAD

I think it would be best start asking for advice in implementing a vpn
plugin in the connman list:

http://connman.net/community

In case upstream doesn't take the plugin it can be also packaged
separately, but I haven't tested that yet. Naturally I recommend
submitting the plugin upstream first.

When we have a connman plugin ready, the next step should be adding VPN
support to the cmcc command-line tool in indicator-network package. Once
that is done, we should start thinking how to add it to the Network Menu
and Network Settings.

I hope this helped. And feel free to ask more advice.

--
Kalle Valo

[Kalle Valo (kvalo)]

Daniel Wagner posted an RFC patch about openvpn:

http://lists.connman.net/pipermail/connman/2010-October/002375.html

[Kalle Valo (kvalo)]

Mohamed Abbas posted patches about vpnc support:

http://lists.connman.net/pipermail/connman/2011-January/003271.html

No idea if they will work or not.

[Kalle Valo (kvalo)]

Mohamed also sent patches for pptp support:

http://lists.connman.net/pipermail/connman/2011-January/003358.html

As it uses pppd, I doubt if upstream takes them. We might need to use them as distro patches.

[Nikita Vetoshkin (nikita-vetoshkin)]

> As it uses pppd, I doubt if upstream takes them
Are there many other ways to implement pptp vpn? Or simply because it would be external dependency for connman?

[Kalle Valo (kvalo)]

Nikita Vetoshkin <email address hidden> writes:

> Are there many other ways to implement pptp vpn? Or simply because it
> would be external dependency for connman?

Connman upstream seems to have strong dislike for pppd since for ofono
they implemented their own ppp stack inside the gatchat module. But I
don't see any easy way to reuse the ofono ppp stack for pptp so using
pppd in this case makes sense to me.

Let's hope that the connman team is sensible and take the patches.

--
Kalle Valo

[Sayantan Das (sayantan13)]

can we have a gui for connecting vpn? just like network-manager-gnome? it makes things so much easier!