So I was having troubles opening a VPN connection from Ubuntu 14.04. I could VPN just fine on my iPad and Android devices, but I was having no luck on Ubuntu. Looking at my /var/log/syslog, and after much Googling, it seems my problem was ‘secrets’/keyring related.
Setting up a PPTP VPN connection is easy.
What I was lacking was one very specific checkbox with many implications, none of which were spelled out. The important one is that “Available to All Users” skips the secrets check, and instead prompts you for a password. That’s better than no VPN at all. 🙂
My advanced settings look something like this, thanks to other tutorials I stumbled across:
Notably, no PAP, as that’s very insecure. The rest of the options, I haven’t tried otherwise. What’s important to me is I can now connect to my VPN.