Deployed in Kuwait - VPNclient configuring w/o networkmanager (pptp)

Question

My laptop connects to a wireless router in the barracks and Kuwait has quite a few filters on what we can access.
I've purchased an account with an online VPN provider and have been able to connect via windows7 and via networkmanager-pptp in Arch.
The problem is, I typically use wicd.  This is for many reasons, but here it's almost necessary since there are multiple routers broadcasting on different channels but all with the same essid; so networkmanager cannot differentiate between them.
Anyway, I know the vpn works but I can't get the configs right without networkmanager.
I've done it according to the wiki and various other posts I read here and elsewhere and I can connect but it doesn't seem to "take".  My ip doesn't change (as seen by what is my ip) and sites are still blocked.  And it get's stranger.  Once connected to the vpn I cannot load any pages except for google / igoogle.  Google chat with my wife works fine, but I'm unable to ping google.com?
And running poff gives me this:
sudo poff myCon
/usr/bin/poff: I could not find a pppd process for provider 'myCon'. None stopped.
here are my connection settings from /peers: http://pastebin.com/pui3rTwv
here are my settings from options.pptp: http://pastebin.com/Lbm6UyMt
and my chap-secrets looks like this:
<my user name> <vpn server ip> <my password> *
And here's a terminal output of  "pon myCon debug dump logfd 2 nodetach":  http://pastebin.com/M79JJp4C
As always, thanks for the help.

Answer 1

actually, you can still do that
1) add static routes for all your vpn servers ip addresses, e.g, route add europe.myvpn.com gw <my isp's default gateway> dev <my device>
for ease of use, add all your routes to a bash script, and then run it from rc.local
2) before connecting to the vpn, you need to disable your default route through eth0/etc , but doing so, you will not be able to connect at all as your myCon config file uses a dns name in the pty parameter instead of the vpn servers ip address, either change it in the config file, or add all those dns-ip mappings to /etc/hosts
3) create multiple ppp config files with different pty parameters, and you can then execute them using a normal bash script containing, pon myEuropeVPN, pon myAsiaVPN, etc.
Last edited by Sin.citadel (2010-06-10 18:14:23)