Network connection not prompting for password

Question

I'm looking at my syslog and seeing very little in the way of useful information about this, but whenever I try to connect to a wifi or VPN connection, I don't get any prompt for auth but the menu on Gnome says "waiting for authentication". I'm not sure how to go about fixing this? It seems to have started happening only since I upgraded to 16.04, and I'm using vpnc (Cisco VPN) on top of the Network-Manager thing.

The syslog just contains info like the UI, e.g it shows the states going from waiting for authorisation to disconnected, it doesn't say anything about trying to prompt for auth.

So far I've tried:

• Re-installing the network-manager
• Restarting dbus
• Multiple reboots
• Cleaning out the folder with all the network configurations in and starting "from scratch"

These steps were taken from the answers in: Unable to connect to VPN using gnome-network-manager

Which this may be a duplicate of? I'll let this exist for now as the solutions there didn't help me and I'm not sure the root cause is the same.

It happens for WiFi, VPN, and any other type of connection which requires auth and uses the network-manager application.

kern.log contains:

May 16 10:11:58 joshuagdev NetworkManager[820]: <error> [1463389918.6751] vpn-connection[0x18b7400,c69258b7-65c1-41d2-86a0-7270b1d4e2a7,"Cambridge VPN",0]: Failed to request VPN secrets #3: No agents were available for this request.

I'm not sure exactly what this means, but it looks like it could be the root cause.

Update. I've managed to connect to the VPN using a terminal:

root@host:/home/user# vpnc-connect
Enter IPSec gateway address: hostname
Enter IPSec ID for hostname: groupuser
Enter IPSec secret for groupuser@hostname: secret
Enter username for hostname: user
Enter password for user@hostname: rsapassword
VPNC started in background (pid: 10735)...

While this solves the problem that I can't get on the VPN, it doesn't solve the problem that I now have to do it the hard way. More suggestions are always welcome!

Solution

You have not got gnome-keyring installed.

Correct this with

sudo apt-get install gnome-keyring

sudo apt-get update

Comments

[Admin]

Sadly in the time it takes me to enter the password it's normally reset itself (RSA auth). I did try something similar a few days ago where I did exactly this, only in the network-manager configuration file directly - this did not let me in (auth failure), but presumably it at least tried the password and it had simply expired.

[Admin]

@jan would you agree this is a dupe? The logging looks the same (askubuntu.com/questions/515982/…). I can't flag it for the bounty though.

[Admin]

did you try renaming/deleting the .gconf, log-out and log-in?

[Admin]

@jan - network-manager-vpnc-gnome is already the newest version (1.1.93-1). Sad times.

[Admin]

@Ron what exactly would deleting .gconf do? It currently seems to be empty so I'm not sure what it would achieve?

[Admin]

Not entirely sure, probably some settings issues, but it seems to work for some users. See it anything given here works for you.

[Admin]

These would be replaced on my system presumably by /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections which contains files for each of the network connections configured - in this instance I have removed all of these files and tried to re-create the connection using the current network-manager, only to get the same issue. Thanks though

[XtrmJosh]

ath9k looks to be a very specific driver for a wifi adapter - it's not on this machine and I suspect installing it would cause some catastrophic conflict and destroy my wifi adapter entirely. Thanks for the thought though!

[Amias]

don't edit your wifi config to disable hardware encryption , thats a completely daft idea and nothing to do with VPN's. Completey different layers of the networking stack. @James you should delete that comment its going to cause people lots of problems

[XtrmJosh]

ath9k is actually an open source wifi adapter driver - not just a config file. The file you're speaking of is in fact a config file for ath9k (hence the naming), and the driver is not installed on my machine. Installing it could cause all sorts of issues which I don't want to have to solve. As I said, thanks for the effort :)

[James]

Alright. This worked for me a while back. I wish you the best of luck!

[XtrmJosh]

Alas, no luck. I don't suppose there might be a scenario where gnome keyring might be at the wrong version? For some reason when I open the "passwords" app (it's called passwords and something, but I can't remember what as I'm temporarily using Plasma), it says "gnome2-keyring" on the left, implying that while the DE itself is on gnome3, the keyring is on gnome2... Has keyring been replaced or made redundant in some way by the latest Gnome DE update?

[Steve Roome]

Try tidying your repository with sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get autoremove sudo apt-get install -f paste the entire termional dialog into your question. You can use paste.ubuntu.com

[Steve Roome]

@XtrmJosh did you try my suggestion?

[XtrmJosh]

Not yet, sorry, we're having a busy period and I'm having to make do with KDE for now. I should get around to it Friday!

[VasyaNovikov]

Thanks, this helped me. (On ArchLinux though.) I wonder why this happens in the first place. Not prompting for password and silently failing is so unbelievably wrong..