key-direction not respected on OVPN import

[Mark Frost]

When creating a VPN connection in Network Manager by importing an existing .ovpn file, the key-direction field is not respected.

I needed to manually go into Advanced->TLS Authentication and set the Key Direction to 1.

For example, my .ovpn file ends with the line:

key-direction 1

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04
Package: network-manager-openvpn 1.1.93-1ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.4.0-47.68-generic 4.4.24
Uname: Linux 4.4.0-47-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.1
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Sun Nov 20 09:06:20 2016
InstallationDate: Installed on 2016-06-30 (143 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS "Xenial Xerus" - Release amd64 (20160420.1)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: network-manager-openvpn
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Giovanni Panozzo (giox069)]

Same problem for me on Ubuntu 16.04. It seems that a workaround could be moving "key-direction 1" line before <tls-auth> line.

[Bernd Konrad (derdummepunkt)]

Ran into this exact issue today myself, 2 years later

openvpn .conf file contains the line
"key-direction 1"

after importing the config file, the key-direction in the vpn profile in the network manager is set to "none", resulting in timeouts when trying to establish the connection.

Took me a while to find that...

[DeltaLima (Marcus) (dlm274)]

Same problem here... Very annoiying - i had to research more hours to find that out ...
Any status from the package/project maintainer? Is that problam that hard to fix? I'm unfortunally not a programmer to do it on my own...

Is this bug also known for 17.10 or 18.04? Have not tried that out ...

73 best wishes

[Peter Rosell (peter-rosell)]

I can confirm that the workaround in comment #3 is working in Ubuntu 16.04.

[Peter Rosell (peter-rosell)]

It seems like this is fixed in a upstream version in the gnome package, https://github.com/GNOME/network-manager-openvpn/commit/28636684a268e280accaeb378f00f4a80e9e0377
I haven't tried it, but the commit comment is quite clear.

"import: fix parsing of key direction

The direction was ignored if the 'key-direction' statement appeared
after 'tls-auth' or 'secret'."

[Giovanni Panozzo (giox069)]

It seems to be fixed in ubuntu 18.04 too. I imported 4 profiles with "key-direction 1" and they all worked.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The fix was added in 1.8.0 which is in bionic