VPN Monitor / Controller Plugin for LXDE / LXpanel and Raspbian Pixel

I was setting up some Rasberry Pi 3 systems as small remote desktop stations so that a friend of mine could take them away with him, plug into a monitor/keyboard/mouse and get access to his company systems.

Now VPN was not essential for that since their remote desktop is encrypted an accessable vi a public IP address. However it was desirable to be able to use VNC too and have remote access back into the pi's. Problem was there was no VPN access from the lxpanel like the users are used to.

We could have used network manager but that is a bit over the top and can have it's own draw backs so I opted to write a panel plugin for lxpanel to monitor & allow pptp VPN to be connected and disconnected.

Requires LXPanel and LXPanel-dev(el) packages to be installed as well as the normal base C development utils. It's a bit (a lot) of a work in progress but it will make / make install on raspbian and many other distros with lxde. As I say, it is by no means a finished product but it does work. Here is the tar, there are extra files in it which are not used but a quick look at the minimal makefile should make it clear which files are needed: -

$ cd myscratchdir $ tar xvzf path-to/vpnmon-20xxxxxx.tar.gz $ cd vpnmon $ make $ sudo make install $ lxpanelctl restart

Then it should be available as a panel item to add.

You WILL need to build from source as I do not supply any binaries.

Download here source: -

As is, absolutely no guarentee or support available. This software may damage your system or compromise your security if not handled with care.