GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 733911
NetworkManager does not support OvenVPN over unmanaged connections
Last modified: 2020-11-12 14:34:00 UTC
I have the following configuration on my desktop PC network: eth0 interface connected to internet, wlan0 is AP for Wi-Fi devices. Both are controlled by ifupdown. I have created OpenVPN configuration to connect to my office network, but I am unable to use it until I get eth0 to be managed by NetworkManager. I really don't want NetworkManager to manage eth0, because there're a lot of issues in security policy configuration with NetworkManager. I just want to be able to run VPN over unmanaged connections (don't quite understand why it's not possible). If required I may provide verbose logs.
JIC: Debian Jessie (testing for now) NM and openvpn plugin version is 0.9.10.0-1
VPN connections in NetworkManager require a device. Also, you can only activate one VPN connection per device. This limitation stems from a design decision in the past, and it's not easily changed. But, hopefully it will happen soon. The solution is to make VPN connections "first class devices". Related bugs are bug 349151, bug 681109. There is work in this area going on, so I depend this bug on bug 681109 (which is about VLAN, but the underlying issue will be the same).
bugzilla.gnome.org is being shut down in favor of a GitLab instance. We are closing all old bug reports and feature requests in GNOME Bugzilla which have not seen updates for a long time. If you still use NetworkManager and if you still see this bug / want this feature in a recent and supported version of NetworkManager, then please feel free to report it at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/-/issues/ Thank you for creating this report and we are sorry it could not be implemented (workforce and time is unfortunately limited).