I recently decided to upgrade my IPCop box and in the process switch my home/office VPN from IPSec to OpenVPN.

First we install, Zerina’s OpenVPN addon to IPCop. Basically copy the zip to the IPCop box, unzip and run the install file. Actually follow this guy’s great tutorial up to step 7. he’s got it all covered.

Now that you have the OpenVPN server all setup and the OpenVPN client package (zip) what’s next? In order for this to work with Fiesty’s network-manager-openpvn package you first have to follow this guy’s great blog post about splitting the .p12 file up. (the .p12 file is found inside the client package zip file)

Ok - now you have a pem, crt and key file… let get it working with the VPN section of network manager. Ensure you have the network-manager-openvpn plugin installed sudo apt-get install network-manager-openvpn. Now click on the NM applet -> VPN Connections -> Configure VPN. Create a new OpenVPN connection.

Under the Required tab:
Gateway address: (your gw address)
Leave port as is
Connection Type: X.509 Certificate
CA File: (your pem file)
Certificate: (your crt file)
Key: (your key file)

Under the Optional tab:
I prefer to have “Only use VPN connection for these addresses”, but it’s up to you.
Ensure “use LZO compression” is checked
Use Cipher: BF-CBC

And you’re done!

Now when you want to connect to your VPN you can just click on the NM applet -> VPN Connections -> (Your VPN name) and it’ll start right up.

There is one annoying bug that I hope will be fixed soon: When you start your VPN it clears your /etc/resolv.conf file. I just have to manually fix it each time. See Lanuchpad bug here.