I just discovered openvpn-admin a mono based GUI application for controlling connection and configuration of the openvpn ssl vpn package (which rocks btw).

It's available from Sourceforge.

One thing I found was it needs to be run as root however it's annoying to have to use su or sudo to run it and then provide a password.

So under Ubuntu 7.10 I simply added an entry to /etc/sudoers to allow my user account to run it as root without being prompted for a password. This means you can put it into your Autostart List so when you log in it's running already.

Always use sudo visudo to edit the /etc/sudoers file

Find the line that starts with %admin in the file and before it put a line with the following.

rupert ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/openvpn-admin

# Members of the admin group may gain root privileges
%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL


Where rupert is your username ALL means any host NOPASSWD: means username dosn't need to enter a password and the final part is the full path to openvpn-admin.

You can then run "sudo openvpn-admin &" from a shell prompt and it will launch without a password the & will tell the process to disconnect from the calling terminal so you can close the terminal and leave it running.