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Older NetworkManager 0.9 or 1.0 based linux distributions

Use the nm-1-0 branch of this repository, i.e

git checkout nm-1-0

Ubuntu and Debian known issues

Package prerequisites for building and running

Issue the following on the command-line to install the prerequisite packages (note: the backslash character \ is the shell line continuation character and is safe to copy and paste) :

sudo apt install \
intltool \
libtool \
network-manager-dev \
libnm-util-dev \
libnm-glib-dev \
libnm-glib-vpn-dev \
libnm-gtk-dev \
libnm-dev \
libnma-dev \
ppp-dev \
libdbus-glib-1-dev \
libsecret-1-dev \
libgtk-3-dev \
libglib2.0-dev \
xl2tpd \
strongswan

Note: if you are not using Ubuntu 16.04 or 16.10, the above dependencies might need to be ammeded slightly.

NetworkManager on Ubuntu 16.04

NetworkManager-l2tp 1.2.4 and the master branch now require libnma from NetworkManager-1.2.0 or later.

Ubuntu 16.04 originally shipped with network-manager-1.1.93 (a developer release-candidate version of NetworkManager 1.2), so the NetworkManager package might need to be updated to satisfy the libnma >= 1.2.0 dependency.

IPsec

strongSwan's charon and stroke daemons are prevented from performing correctly as child processes under NetworkManager-l2tp due to an AppArmor name space issue involving NetworkManager and the AppArmor profiles for charon and stroke.

Currently the simplest workaround is to disable two strongSwan AppArmor profiles :

sudo ln -s /etc/apparmor.d/usr.lib.ipsec.charon /etc/apparmor.d/disable/
sudo apparmor_parser -R /etc/apparmor.d/usr.lib.ipsec.charon
sudo ln -s /etc/apparmor.d/usr.lib.ipsec.stroke /etc/apparmor.d/disable/
sudo apparmor_parser -R /etc/apparmor.d/usr.lib.ipsec.stroke

L2TP

In some situations a L2TP connection isn't able to be established with the system xl2tpd package, while it can be established with a locally built xl2tpd installed to /usr/local/, which involves removing the system xl2tpd and installing the libpcap0.8-dev build dependency :

sudo apt remove xl2tpd
sudo apt install libpcap0.8-dev

wget https://github.com/xelerance/xl2tpd/archive/v1.3.6/xl2tpd-1.3.6.tar.gz
tar xvzf xl2tpd-1.3.6.tar.gz
cd xl2tpd-1.3.6
make
sudo make install

Debugging

Issuing sudo journalctl -b on the command-line may provide hints for the cause of AppArmor, strongSwan and xl2tpd issues.