To access my work’s network from any location outside the office my employer requires me to use a VPN. In Ubuntu this does not work by default. While the network manager does have a VPN tab, all it’s buttons are greyed out. Depending on the type of VPN that you need to access you need to install additional software packages.

In my case I needed to access a PPTP VPN, the package that Ubuntu has to do so is pptp-linux (if you need another type of connection you should search for the word vpn in the package manager). Installing that package does not add options to the network manager. While you could configure the VPN by hand (by editing configuration files somewhere in /etc, depending on the installed VPN client), an easier way is to install a plugin for the network manager, and then use the network manager’s GUI to configure your VPN connections and to control use of to those VPN connections. For the pptp-linux the network manager plugin package is network-manager-pptp.