OpenVPN auto-connect options greyed out or missing for no reason

[Paul]

"Automatically connect to this network..." and "Automatically connect to VPN when..." are greyed out or missing from the GUI, the former is also "checked" however this is not true as it never attempts to auto connect.

There's no reason for these to be unavailable, especially when personal encrypted passwords and keys are used.

[Jordi Miralles (jmiralles)]

Hi, do you mean on the "Network connections" menu where you select the network connection to use? If it's correctly listed under "VPN" that you won't have the "automatically connect to this network at startup", you need to designate a real network interface that will be brought up on boot (like wired) and then select on that interface options to automatically connect to the VPN when brought up.

The VPN is creating a virtual interface (tun0 usually) but it needs first that an actual interface is up and able to send/receive the packets for the TLS handshake (and the rest of the packets later too, actually), so it doesn't look like a bug to me ? Are you able to check those two options on any other network connection?

[Paul (paul17041993)]

I realise now the inverted logic the GUI actually implies, you need to select the VPN connection from a physical connection, not select the physical from the VPN.

I'd say 'Automatically connect to VPN when using this connection' needs to be worded better as to not imply 'this connection' as being the one in the drop-down menu. A note should be added to VPN connections to explain why these options are greyed out, to prevent further confusion.

[Jordi Miralles (jmiralles)]

Well, this is the official Ubuntu wiki: https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/net-vpn-connect.html

In case you can think of any improvement to make it clearer I guess that the Documentation team will be more than happy to have a look at it. :)

[Jordi Miralles (jmiralles)]

Not a bug.

[Paul (paul17041993)]

I was talking about the text in the GUI's themselves, never looked at the wiki, of which looks to be far less useful then clicking through the GUI's and working it out yourself...

[Valerio Bozzolan (bozzy)]

Going to the single VPN, I also once saw the "Automatically connect to VPN" menu grayed out and not selectable.

Then I realized that you have to go to another normal connection (e.g. wired, Wi-Fi, etc) and select "General configuration" > "Automatically connect to VPN".

https://askubuntu.com/questions/43465/how-to-automatically-connect-to-vpn-with-network-manager