if you stay with the mouse over the "Add" button, do you see a tooltip message? What does it say?

(In reply to Thomas Haller from comment #1)
> if you stay with the mouse over the "Add" button, do you see a tooltip
> message? What does it say?

Hi Thomas. There is no tooltip displayed when hovering over the "Add" button. Neither when all fields are filled out, nor when all fields are empty.

Hi Dnaiel,

I see.

In the screenshot you are using gnome-control-center, but it also happens with nm-connection-editor (both nma-1-0 and master branches).

-- in nm-connection-editor you would see a tooltip telling you that the CA is missing.

The code in question is here: https://git.gnome.org/browse/network-manager-openvpn/tree/properties/auth-helpers.c?id=7f17349ed949b8c434c1a91f6f828b13822278ac#n514

Unless you're using static-key mode, openvpn clients operate in "tls-client" mode and that appears to require a CA certificate according to the openvpn 2.3.4 source code, per options.c::options_postprocess_verify_ce().

  if (options->tls_server || options->tls_client)
    {
#ifdef ENABLE_PKCS11
      if (options->pkcs11_providers[0])
       {
       }
      else
#endif
#ifdef ENABLE_CRYPTOAPI
     if (options->cryptoapi_cert)
	{
	}
      else
#endif
      if (options->pkcs12_file)
        {
        }
      else
        {
	  if ((!(options->ca_file)) && (!(options->ca_path)))
	    msg(M_USAGE, "You must define CA file (--ca) or CA path (--capath)");

AFAIK there is no "password only" encrypted mode without TLS.  OpenVPN supports three basic modes: (1) no encryption, (2) static key, or (3) SSL/TLS, and I believe (3)/TLS requires a CA certificate.

Yeah, I thought this may have been an erroneous bug report after looking up how to set up OpenVPN and it seemed that you needed to generate a CA key to then hand out to users of the VPN.

Just trying to connect to an SSL VPN service for work on Linux and it's turning out to be quite the pain - which is running OpenVPN. All the clients on Windows and Mac just accept the Gateway address, username, and password to connect, but none of the Network Manager clients (should say, all of the Linux clients I have tried) seem to permit this.

Just as an addendum, I should note that in the "Authentication" section of the Network Manager dialog are the following options:
    * Certificates (TLS)
    * Password
    * Password with Certificates (TLS)
    * Static Key

The second "password" option does not have TLS in parenthesis next to it (i.e. implying password only without TLS)? Perhaps just something to clear up in case others come across a similar situation :-)

Kind regards and apologies,
 ~ Daniel.

(In reply to Daniel from comment #6)
> Just trying to connect to an SSL VPN service for work on Linux and it's
> turning out to be quite the pain - which is running OpenVPN. All the clients
> on Windows and Mac just accept the Gateway address, username, and password
> to connect, but none of the Network Manager clients (should say, all of the
> Linux clients I have tried) seem to permit this.

Doesn't the Windows/Mac clients also use the Openvpn binary? So there shouldn't be a difference there.

Apart from the UI restricion, just for a quick test try to edit the connection in "/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/$FILE" and remove the CA certificate setting there (followed by a `nmcli connection reload`).
Then nm-openvpn-plugin should still work and just not pass any CA path. Does that work or does openvpn error out due to missing ca-cert?