[StrongSwan] Starting the service providing the VPN connection failed

[muvori]

Hello everyone,

I’m having a problem with the strongswan VPN on Manjaro Linux. Everytime I try to connect to a VPN through strongswan I get the error “Starting the service providing the VPN connection failed.” This seems to have happened recently as I’ve used this very strongswan VPN before no problem. In addition, when I try and fail to connect to the VPN, upon shutdown of my PC I get an error message from systemd saying it’s waiting for shutdown of “charon-nm”. Even on a clean install of Manjaro it does not work.
I’m glad to receive any pointers as to what could solve the problem, or is it’s a problem upstream maybe.

Thanks!

[muvori]

Another user found the solution already:

@Guidoch

Open a shell and write:

nmcli connection edit <YOUR_CONNECTION>

This will open the nmcli prompt in edit mode for the connection you specify.
You can type print to see all the values or print vpn.data where you will find your vpn parameters. Check if you have the following: certificate = , which will make it fail 100%.

Copy the whole vpn.data you just printed, edit it in any editor removing the certificate = , then you can replace it with the following:
remove vpn.data
set vpn.data <YOUR_CONFIG_WITHOUT_CERTIFICATE_HERE>
save
quit

Then try ```nmcli connection up <YOUR_CONNECTION> and see what it tells you. If it fails, you’ll receive a journal log pointer to see the log.

If you want to debug it, first type: sudo nmcli g log level

Hope it helps