Another post concerning my upgrade experience with Ubuntu 8.10 this time with regards to VPN connections. I keep meaning to take the time to write a more comprehensive piece about the upgrade as a whole but for now I’ll keep posting little snippets of minor annoyances and how I solved them.

This problem appeared when I attempted to connect to a VPN for the first time since the upgrade. Firstly all of my saved VPN connections were gone, slightly annoying but understandable since the network manager has undertaken a major overhaul in this version. So I create a new VPN connection to a Windows 2003 Small Business Server I manage, I entered the host, username, password and domain and left everything else as default. I try to connect to the new connection and almost immediately an error message pops-up (certainly quicker than my machine could even resolve the hostname)

The precise error was “The vpn connection xxx failed because there were no valid VPN secrets” (not quite the precise error message since the connection wasn’t called xxx, having a VPN connection named xxx would conjure up unsavoury, NSFW thoughts…)

I won’t go into the whys and hows because I honestly haven’t had the time to find out but the answer for me was to go back and edit the VPN connection and remove the password. Next time I connected to the VPN I was prompted for the password and everything was back to normal and I can continue with my task of reading someone elses email mwah hahaha!