Productivity Sauce

Ask any knowledgeable mobile user, and they will tell you that the best way to securely access the Internet in public places is through a VPN (virtual private network) connection. So if you enjoy sipping coffee at a local cafe while checking email and browsing the Web, a secure VPN connection is a good solution to protect the data traveling to and from your machine. Although you can go the DIY way and set up your own VPN server, using a dedicated VPN service provider would save you a lot of work and time. There are a few reputable VPN service providers out there, but for my money, StrongVPN is the best of the bunch. It offers reliable service and excellent support at competitive prices. I'm not affiliated with StrongVPN in any way, but I've been using their VPN solution for almost a year, and it has been a smooth ride so far.

To make your Ubuntu machine play nicely with StrongVPN, you have to configure a VPN connection using Gnome Network Manager. But before you can do that, you have to install the network-manager-pptp package which enables support for the PPTP protocol used by StrongVPN. To do this, run the following command in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install network-manager-pptp

Now click on the Network Manager icon in the top panel (this will display a list of available network interfaces and wireless networks) and choose VPN Connections -> Configure VPN. Press the Add button, select the Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) from the Connection Type drop-down list and press Create. Give the new VPN connection a name and fill out the Gateway, Username, and Password fields. Press the Advanced button and tick the Use Point-to-point encryption (MPPE) check box. Press OK and then Apply to save the settings and close the configuration window.

Before you can use the created connection, there is one more thing you have to do. In the terminal, run the gconf-editor command to launch the Gnome configuration editor. Navigate to system -> networking -> connections and select the vpn item. Right-click somewhere in the right pane and select New Key. Configure the new key as follows:

Name: refuse-eap
Type: String
Value: yes

Press OK and close the editor. Reboot the machine and your VPN connection is ready to go. By the way, the described technique works not only with StrongVPN, but also with any PPTP-based VPN providers.

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