New servers mean new things to play with and new setups that have to be done. I set up a new VM that I wanted to always be connected to a VPN and for that VPN to come up whenever the system is started. The biggest “problem” here is that this VM is running in runlevel 3 so no GUI is available. So let’s jump into setting up an OpenVPN client using network manger’s command line interface

Download the OpenVPN Config

For my VPN, I’m using UsenetServer which has hosts all over the world. From the account page, you can download a zip of all the OpenVPN configs. Pull this zip down onto your system, and extract it into a folder.

wget https://usenetserver.com/vpn/software/uns_configs.zip
mkdir openvpn
unzip uns_configs.zip -d openvpn

Import the OpenVPN Config

After you’ve decided which host you want to connect to, you’ll need to import that VPN configuration into NetworkManager.

cd openvpn
nmcli connection import type openvpn file atl-a01.ovpn

Now if you list out your connections, you should see atl-a01 listed

nmcli connection show

Adding VPN Credentials

Now that we’ve imported our OpenVPN settings, we need to add our credentials to the file to make it so we can auto start the VPN connection. Edit your system-connections file under /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/ and make the following changes

#Change this from 1 to 0 so that it doesn't try to load the keyring
password-flags=0

#Add this under the [vpn] section
username=johnnyeveryteen@usenetserver

[vpn-secrets]
password=MarilynMonroe-bot

Then reload your config in NetworkManager

nmcli connection reload atl-a01

Now we can manually test it by bringing up the VPN and testing our public IP.

dig +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com
nmcli connection up atl-a01
dig +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com

You should see two different IP address printed before and after bringing up the connection

Auto Connecting

This is actually the hardest part of the whole thing to do. We create a script in /root/bin/keepvpnup and then run it via cron.

#!/bin/bash

VPNNAME='atl-a01'
VPNSTATUS=$(nmcli connection show --active $VPNNAME | wc -l)
if [ "$VPNSTATUS" == "0" ]
then
    nmcli connection up $VPNNAME > /dev/null 2>&1
fi

Then we put this in crontab by running crontab -e and set it to run every minute

@reboot /root/bin/keepvpnup
* * * * * /root/bin/keepvpnup

This isn’t ideal but it will mean that our VPN will be down at most 1 minute before being brought back up. This also allows us to start/stop services when the VPN is down and/or alert someone that it’s down.