Soon after installing 17.10 on my notebook, I found myself struggling to connect to the corporate VPN in order to do some work from home. While this could be a great excuse to use my home time for things like resting or spending time with the family, being able to connect to serves locked behind firewalls in order to respond to problems is something that comes with the job. Unfortunately, while Artful Aardvark does make it easy to connect to a VPN, it does not make it easy to do so when you're trying to connect to an L2TP VPN network.
Luckily, the solution is pretty simple, and no reboots are required.
First, we need to add a PPA to our system and update apt to get the list of available packages:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nm-l2tp/network-manager-l2tp
sudo apt-get updateThen we install two packages:
sudo apt install network-manager-l2tp network-manager-l2tp-gnomeAnd that's all. Now we'll see the option to add an L2TP VPN to our settings so that we can get on with our lives.
There are some concerns that L2TP has been pretty much abandoned as it's not the most secure form of VPN out there, but this doesn't mean we can't make it work for the sake of our employer.