unable to import config with inlined ca, cert, key or tls-auth

I wanted to share the configuration (dummy):

remote vpn.example.org
client
proto tcp
port 443
dev tun
ns-cert-type server
auth-user-pass
auth-retry interact
comp-lzo
verb 3

<ca>
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
FOO
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
</ca>

<cert>
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
FOO
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
</cert>

<key>
-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
FOO
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
</key>

key-direction 1
<tls-auth>
#
# 2048 bit OpenVPN static key (Server Agent)
#
-----BEGIN OpenVPN Static key V1-----
FOO
-----END OpenVPN Static key V1-----
</tls-auth>

So the quickfix here is that you can dissect the file and import it all once you figured out the corresponding dropdown/whatever in the network manager. So for example in the example above I needed to select "Passwords with certificates (TLS)" and enter another user/pass along with it, no password for the key and also the TLS key and direction in advanced.

One more note - the following settings seemed to get imported:
proto, port, comp-lzo, remote

The rest was ignored.

I hope this helps.

I have the same problem in importing the ovpn file provided by my company system administrators

Same problem for me under Ubuntu 10.04.

Running "sudo openvpn --config client.ovpn" works though.

Same problem in Ubuntu 10.10.

Again, "sudo openvpn --config client.ovpn" works properly.

Thanks for posting the workaround, it's definitively a small bug in network-manager-openvpn.

I can confirm that in Ubuntu 10.10:

Specially: statements auth-user-pass and route are ignored.

So most config are not possible to import.
To set auth-user-pass manually in applet is trivial, but add e.g. 20 route statements via this interface is quite impossible.

See for example attached config for popular USA IP service with man routes.

BTW - in this example - OpenVPN do not addd route to host (--remote) via the old GW. I'm not sure, if it is not also a bug, but the config fails. It is necessary to add also this route statement:

route remote_host net_gateway

--kapetr

To add to this - the export feature is broken too.

I tried to rescue a couple profiles which I had done on another workstation for backup purposes, but it didn't work at all in 10.04.1.

I have the same issue in Ubuntu 11.04 where importing a .ovpn file isn't completely imported.

same issue in Oneiric

This problem still exists in Precise.

Can't hook up to my ISP's VPN. IT'S 2012

Found a way to do this that works under GUI network-manager

http://howto.praqma.net/ubuntu/vpn/openvpn-access-server-client-on-ubuntu

paqma.net website is down but the work around i still published at
http://askubuntu.com/questions/134918/setting-vpn-client

almost 2 years .... maybe we should write a bash to break down the ovpn into certificate files if this bug can't be fixed ?

2013... Ubuntu 12.10... still not working...

Used the workaround from #14 and got it working, but without the fix I'm having the same issues.

Come on, were Weeks away from Raring(13.04) Quit Dropping the ball on things like this Ubuntu Team!

2013... Ubuntu 13.04... still not working...
Eg. certs configuration are imported (#14 method) but still not connecting from GUI.

I confirm the same problem.
ovpn conf files produced by the openvpn/privatetunnel site:

https://www.privatetunnel.com/

are not imported correctly by the network-manager on ubuntu 13.04.
They instead work giving the command

openvpn --config xxx.ovpn

I am having the same problem importing a file for Watchguard on Saucy with all updates using network manager (today is July 20th 2013).
The "sudo openvpn --config client.ovpn" works properly.

same problem, ubuntu 13.10 here

Confirmed, same problem in 13.10
This bug is around since more than two years now :(

Proud to be the first posting 2014. Wow. C'mon folks...

This is the more related upstream bug:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=633337

Please add your comments there explaining all problems importing .ovpn files (certs not imported, invalid TLS selection and other badly imported parameters).
Maybe someone will notice it one day... :(

same in Trusy Tahr 14.04

Confirmed, same bug in 14.04.
Well, the workaround "sudo openvpn --config client.ovpn" is still working.

I am having issues with 14.04 lts openvpn client for gnome as well. I get the same freezing and not loading the config file issues. I had to revert back to 12.04 lts as this feature is needed in my line of work. Any fix available?

Same as #25 and #26.

Actually, I'm not having luck with the workaround: it seems that DNS settings have not been updated to find recources in the VPN.

This bug affects me as well.

Anyone got a script working to automate the creation of the separate certificates and keys from inside the .ovpm file?
Would be a great workaround till this gets fixed

2015... Nothing was done yet. Let's make some movements.

Here is the import function:
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~network-manager/network-manager-openvpn/trunk/view/head:/properties/import-export.c#L268

and here are the lines of ca/cert/key tags parsing:
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~network-manager/network-manager-openvpn/trunk/view/head:/properties/import-export.c#L563

My suggestion is to save inline ca/cert/key inside of a Network Manager configurations file encoded into base64 (again) with "inline:" prefix, e.g.:
[connection]
id=MyVPN
uuid=ac9d354e-03ef-4063-8c96-4a40bd17bea6
type=vpn

[vpn]
service-type=org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.openvpn
connection-type=tls
remote=myvpnhost.com
cert-pass-flags=0
tap-dev=no
proto-tcp=no
mssfix=no
ca=inline:<base64 coded>
cert=inline:<base64 coded>
key=inline:<base64 coded>

Another approach would be to parse as much information from *.ovpn file as we can, remove parsed parts, encode rest of the file into a base64 string, and save it into a Network Manager connection config file. This may help to deal with extra options like inline certificates, but may also cause unexpected configuration conflicts.

I am experiencing the same problem.

Can somebody please fix this?

Would be really nice if somebody could take a look at this and work on it. Thanks :)

I have created a small python script to extract the embedded certificates and to rewrite the ovpn config to use separate key and cert files.

https://gist.github.com/seebk/bb94a7fd70d4cc454aaa

Maybe it helps to simplify the error prone manual setup until this bug is fixed.

Hope this bug will be addressed - five years without a fix - is far too long...
:(

Come on, many of the latest OpenVPN implementations use in-line certificates by default... how can this bug be still there five years later?

Happy Birthday to this Bug !!!

Sarcasm apart - it is amazing that such an important piece of software is not been supported properly - particularly with the corporate market requesting it.

if the suggestion here:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=633337

is correct - that it is not possible to handle inline certificates & it will be necessary to manually edit the ovpn file.

could we have an article/wiki explaining the steps to do so?

or a small utility that could do this work?

Thanks,

could this be the answer?

https://naveensnayak.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/ubuntu-openvpn-with-ovpn-file/

Thanks,

@Nicolas It is not the answer for *inlined* certificates. You can extract inline certificates into separate files, but it is not what people requested here.

@datsi, I noticed that the importer has trouble with "comp-lzo something". Using "comp-lzo" alone worked for me but I didn't test with inline cert nor PKCS12.

I just tested with inlined ca, cert, key and tls-auth on Ubuntu Xenial. All of them are properly imported, the only problem is how to specify the tls-auth key direction if any.

With inlined style, <tls-auth> requires specifying the key direction with the "key-direction" parameter. The problem is the importer just ignores the "key-direction" parameter.

For what it's worth, an out-of-the-box OpenVPN 2.1.3 Access Server user-locked configuration file only needs 1 parameter changed to import with the "network-manager-openvpn-gnome" tool.

The line that says:
reneg-sec 604800

Comment that out.
# reneg-sec 604800

Imports without issue now.

With Ubuntu 16.04, solution provided by #77 worked. Thanks, Micah.

Holy cow! Micah you cracked it for me too! Finally after all these years I can use OpenVPN without cli. Kudos to you.

Can also confirm that solution specified in comment #77 worked for me on Ubuntu 16.04.1. Thank you Micah!

I've found that removing the #comments in the TA key helped.

I'm sorry, but im a newbie, but how does this fix get into the ubuntu versions? Do we have to wait until network-manager-openvpn (Ubuntu) gets assigned?

This is working for me now. When I import into Network Manager, it literally tells me which line is the problem now, and whatever line that is, I comment it out and it works. Before, it would just tell me that there was an issue importing but it wasn't specific. But at least now, Network Manager helps me figure out the issue. I recently switched to Ubuntu GNOME, so I'm not sure if there's something specific with the GNOME implementation that displays specific errors, or if Network Manager has changed. At least it's working for me now, albeit with manual intervention being required.

In my opinion, the real issue at this point is that even though commenting out some lines helps, each line is valid and should be accepted. If I export an .ovpn file and use it via the command line, it works without issue (even without commenting out anything). In my view, if the config file is valid enough for OpenVPN itself, it should surely be valid for Network Manager. Perhaps the OpenVPN spec has updated and Network Manager hasn't been updated to match?

I'm on ubuntu 16.10,

I have pfsense running my openVPN service, and I exported the client config to an ovpn file (inline).

When I get network-manager to import, I STILL get "the plugin does not support import capability".

This bug has been open for OVER 6 YEARS now. How about we get this conclusively fixed already??? I have to switch to Windows to VPN in, I can't get network-manager to use any of my VPN info, even if I manually enter it.

It's mind-blowing this still exists as a problem.

funnily enough, the bug is actually fixed, all what is needed is actually network-manager-openvpn-gnome (I tested it on version 1.1.93-1ubuntu1.1 in 16.04.2) installed and then the network settings configuration gui restarted so the new VPN shows up as openvpn, after that importing the configuration from ovpn file works..

im on 16.04.2 too, but i still see the bug. the workaround #77 didnt help for me too..

I was able to import my config after making the adjustment outlined here : https://askubuntu.com/a/816140

However now I am having issues with systemd and my tap device, I'm not sure it's correctly creating it as I'm doing bridging not tunneling on the server end :( (probably unrelated here though)

Also, please note that the above method for the import did not correctly import my key direction, I had to change that after importing, which is weird.

The error I get is:

"The file 'file.ovpn' could not be read or does not contain recognized VPN connection information

Error: Key file contains line 'dev tun' which is not a key-value pair, group, or comment."

If I edit the file and remove the line "comp-lzo adaptive" from the end of the file the import is successful.

The original bug as reported was a failure to import certain configuration files using network-mangaer-openvpn. This turned out to be due to the use of inlined key material (comment 24). network-manager-openvpn did not support this as a feature at the time, so was unable to parse this type of configuration file.

Support was since added (comment 46). This has been confirmed to work (comments 49, 63, 67, 68 etc). Therefore, this bug as reported has been fixed, so I'm setting it to Fix Released.

It may well be that this doesn't solve configuration imports for all users, as is clear from subsequent comments. But we track one issue per bug, since otherwise statements like "this bug is fixed" and "this bug is not fixed" become meaningless, developers cannot track what they are being asked to do, and users end up with wildly varying expectations that can never be met.

Note that a failure to import a configuration can be an entire class of bugs, not just one single bug. This bug's original reporter's problem turned out to be "doesn't work with inlined key material". Clearly that's not the only thing wrong here, as adding inlined key material support solved the problem for some, but not others. Of the remaining users here who still have import problems, there may yet be *multiple* underlying bugs. So please don't all pile on to a different bug thinking you're still all affected by the same issue.

If you'd like to see your problem fixed, and you'd like to help, then first please read "How to Report Bugs Effectively" (https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html) carefully. Take some time to work out exact steps to reproduce your problem, make sure that they really do reproduce, and then paste exact and detailed instructions on how to reproduce your problem into a new bug report. Don't assume that someone else's import failure problem is due to the same underlying bug as your import failure problem. Do link to bugs that you think may be related (such as this one). Don't worry about filing duplicates; in this kind of case it takes far more effort to untangle reports that turn out to have different root causes then it does to mark duplicate bugs if this becomes clear to developers later.

I hope this helps. I can't guarantee what will come next, but by filing actionable reports at least you'll be one step closer to real progress.

network-manager-openvpn was fixed in Xenial with https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager-openvpn/1.1.93-1

plasma-nm was fixed in Wily with https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-nm/4:5.3.95-0ubuntu1

Just experienced this issue in Ubuntu 17.04. Manually configuring the key-direction as stated in #76 fixed it.

My ubuntu 16.04 has affected but #77 fixed it.

I was able to solve my problems on Ubuntu Mate 18.04 by using the command line (rather than the network manager gui) to import the .ovpn as follows:

User@Node-99:~/Downloads$ sudo nmcli connection import type openvpn file Miami.ovpn

Error: failed to import 'Miami.ovpn': configuration error: invalid 1th argument to “mssfix” where number expected (line 6).

What is good about the command line is that it is more verbose and will help you find which line in your .ovpn file is causing the error.

In my case I used a text editor to open the file Miami.ovpn and I commented out the offending line (It was line 6)

So I placed a # in front of the line and a space.

After doing that:

User@Node-99:~/Downloads$ sudo nmcli connection import type openvpn file Miami.ovpn
Connection 'Miami' (cb4d9379-9f35-4b03-b53d-3af05781e5aa) successfully added.

Problem solved. VPN able to connect now and it shows up as a choice inside of the Network manager.

I am having the same issue on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

sudo nmcli connection import type openvpn file config.ovpn
gives the following error
Error: failed to import 'config.ovpn': configuration error: unsupported 3th argument net_gateway to “route” (line 12).

Running
sudo openvpn config.ovpn
works

Made a script to split a single OpenVPN file to multiple to avoid the issue due to XML chunks within the single file breaking network-manager-openvpn when importing
https://gist.github.com/ThomasG77/5c09eead1244f9d1d2bd7fa70b26fead