Tag: systemd

Enabling OpenVPN configuration / autostart on Ubuntu

This assumes that you’ve already made sure that your configuration is valid and is able to connect (you can do this by calling openvpn --config /etc/openvpn/FILENAME.conf directly. It won’t be daemonized, but it will give you any errors on the console directly).

There’s a few details you’ll have to get right before the openvpn daemon starts your configuration automagically under Ubuntu:

  1. Your configuration has to be under /etc/openvpn/FILENAME.conf. The .conf part is important. If it ends with .ovpn or anything else, it won't be loaded.
  2. Ubuntu isn't set to start all configurations by default. You can change this by editing /etc/default/openvpn. Change the AUTOSTART variable to the configurations you want to start when the daemon starts. The example in the file says "all", which means that all defined configurations will start. This is OK if you want to keep openvpn up at all times.
  3. You have to tell systemd that you've changed the default file. If you don't do this, nothing will have appeared to change for openvpn - unless you restart the OS. And you don't want to restart your server just to make a setting visible. Do systemctl daemon-reload to make systemd reload the settings (this is also in the comments in the file, but hey, you don't have time to read those, so now you're searching Google instead).
  4. Restart openvpn: service openvpn restart
  5. Confirm that everything went OK by looking in /var/log/syslog