After having had lots and lots of troubles with the proprietary Juniper VPN client (On some GNU/Linux versions including the distro used by the computational chemistry group it refused working at all!) formerly exclusively recommended by our university’s IT management, the Steinbuch Centre for Computing (SCC), I was very happy to see that now (since when?) they also support OpenVPN.
On my Ubuntu 10.04 + GNOME 2 system, running
sudo apt-get install network-manager-openvpn-gnome
sudo -r shutdown now
(yes, it needs to reboot…) was sufficient to allow me importing the configuration file provided by the SCC into the GNOME NetworkManager. (VPN Connections → Configure VPN… → Import Then enter your user name and password and confirm.) The configuration file along with some additional information is available from the SCC’s website.
It should be installed by default but if not, first install OpenVPN via
sudo apt-get install openvpn
I hope many students and employees will now use OpenVPN so they switch from trial to regular operation. Kicking out the Juniper client was an important step for me towards a fully free desktop.
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