I have a workstation with a fixed IP address. I also from time to time connect to a PPTP VPN tunnel and a OpenVPN tunnel. NetworkManager (nm-applet) in Ubuntu has the ability to connect to both types of tunnel. However this only works when the eth0 interface is in Roaming mode (which is another way of saying a dynamically assigned dhcp interface).

So I can’t use the NetworkManager applet to configure either PPTP or OpenVPN tunnels because I lose my static IP address as soon I make eth0 roaming.

A workaround could be to make a DHCP reservation for my eth0 interface to get it to mimic a statically assigned IP address and then set eth0 in NetworkManager into roaming mode.

I would prefer if they simply enabled access to the VPN Tunnel options in nm-applet even if the eth0 interface was statically assigned.

But until they do the above I am relying on sudo /etc/init.d/openvpn start and pptp-config to build my tunnels on a statically assigned eth0