Saturday, June 22, 2013

VPNBook : No Valid VPN Secrets.....

VPNBook is a 100% Free VPN service without any need for registration or sign-up.

In order to set up a VPN connection with pptp or openvpn using a GUI I did the following ( as root ) :

apt-get install network-manager-gnome network-manager-openvpn-gnome network-manager-pptp-gnome



The nm-applet showed an unmanaged Wired connection. Unmanaged devices means NetworkManager doesn't handle those network devices.

You need to edit as root the following files :

(1) /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf

Change line managed=false in managed=true

(2) /etc/network/interfaces

Comment out the last two lines
# The primary network interface
allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

So it will look like this :
# The primary network interface
#allow-hotplug eth0
#iface eth0 inet dhcp

Restart NetworkManager :

/etc/init.d/network-manager restart

Now nm-applet shows a managed connection :


Choose Network Settings in nm-applet and click on the + sign and create a VPN Interface


Choose PPTP and the following window opens up :


Go to VPNBook and look for the PPTP settings. I choose Server #3 : uk1.vpnbook.com (UK VPN - optimized for fast web surfing; no p2p downloading).

Connection name : uk1.vpnbook.com
Gateway : uk1.vpnbook.com
User name : vpnbook
Password : phefra7U ( password changes every one to two weeks ! )
Check Available for all users

Go to Advanced and check Use Point-to-Point encryption ( MPPE )



Now you can go to the nm-applet and choose the VPN connection......but nothing happened....

tail -f /var/log/syslog  ( as root ) showed a message about Failed to request VPN secrets #2: (6) No agents were available for this request.....
After some Googling I found a solution ( link ) :

As root edit /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/uk1.vpnbook.com and under [vpn], change the password flags line to:

password-flags=0

And add the following:
[vpn-secrets]
password=phefra7U

Then again : /etc/init.d/network-manager restart

Now it works...

In order to get OpenVPN working I found a solution at this post http://howto.praqma.net/ubuntu/vpn/openvpn-access-server-client-on-ubuntu

Go to VPNBook and download one of the OpenVPN Certificate Bundles ( e.g Server #3 ).

Unzip the file and choose one of the ovpn files. Follow the instructions in the above link from the line
Open client.opvn in an editor....till....Remove both < key >  tags from client.ovpn.

Insert the following lines in the ovpn file :

ca ca.crt
cert client.crt
key client.key

Activities > Applications >Network Connections > VPN > Import.
Choose your ovpn file and fill in username and password...

As root edit /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/vpnbook-uk1-tcp80 and under [vpn], change the password flags line to:

password-flags=0

And add the following:
[vpn-secrets]
password=phefra7U

Again : /etc/init.d/network-manager restart




Update : I noticed that these OpenVPN Certificate Bundles may change as well, so you have to repeat the procedure above from time to time....


Friday, June 21, 2013

Unofficial debian-multimedia.org Repository Is No Longer Safe To Use

Debian warns on its blog : The unofficial third party repository Debian Multimedia stopped using the domain debian-multimedia.org some months ago. The domain expired and it is now registered again by someone unknown to Debian.....This means that the repository is no longer safe to use, and you should remove the related entries from your sources.list file.


Not sure if you're using the debian-multimedia repository? You can easily check it by running:

grep -i debian-multimedia.org /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*

If you can see debian-multimedia.org line in output, you should remove all the lines including it.

The need of an external repository for multimedia related packages has been greatly reduced with the release of Wheezy, which features many new and updated codecs and multimedia players.

If you're wondering where it went, it moved to deb-multimedia.org......