Upon fresh install of centos 7 everything looks pretty good, very similar of course to fedora but when I went to set up my vpn, network manager is simply very limited and non-functionional, even after installing all of epel and all of the openvpn packages. (after restart network manager behaves the same)

And the network manager behavior is such, I can enter IPsec settings or import from file, and all of the config files from my provider are rejected 'unable to open' or 'missing conn statement'

I would prefer not to operate my vpn from the command line and the fedora feature that integrates into the toolbar with status is basically at this point standard. (as in being able to confirm vpn status before doing things that require vpn is an important if not essential feature to the actual security of the software)

What am I missing? Or is centos a vpn from command line only type of distro?

This article should help: https://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/D...US/ch-vpn.html

A web search for "CentOS VPN" will turn up a number of other tutorials, including one from Digital Ocean, who's tutorials tend to be quite good: https://www.digitalocean.com/communi...er-on-centos-7

Those two links are not helpful because I am not setting up a server, I am just trying to connect to my vpn provider with a file or my basic settings.

Why is ipsec the only option and when i try to add my files, they are all rejected? I should at least be able to manually select other types than ipsec, right?

@mikudo, CentOS 7 does not support many options from the Networkmanager applet. But If you want to connect to a provider which supports OpenVPN protocol, you can do so from command line.

See here.

Try this and report if you get stuck

This is a helpful response and the other thread provided a lot of information.

However, already before this response I had erased centos and installed something else.

If in 2018 the centos project is deciding to limit and provide mininal vpn features to their full featured install, then that simply informs me that this project is living on a different planet and is so far removed from real security concerns that I have no interest in it.

How this could not have been a priority to the developers is really a mystery.

I have been using a gui vpn for years now and to think i have to check some cli session to determine if my vpn has lapsed like i used to have to do is a realy whaaaa? situation for me. I would understand it from something like mint or some other small distro, but centos is a flagship distro and to see something so backwards supports, heavily, the view that the rh world needs to be held in suspicion in regards to systemd and their other three letter agency pals.

Thanks again for the informative link, but no I will not be using cli for my vpn unless I am sent back in time.

@Mikudo,

There is no need for CentOS bashing. Their intention is to provide you with a RHEL experience minus the support cost, not world's greatest desktop OS. It starts off as an enterprise focused product but it can be tamed and tweaked for personal use.

For a lot of users, GUI tools are clumsy and setting a one line command on one of terminal is easier. To each, their own.