Cisco VPN Add Button Greyed Out on Ubuntu 22.04: Fix It

You fill in the gateway, the group name, the group password and your credentials, and the Add button stays grey. Nothing is highlighted, nothing explains what is missing, so the natural conclusion is a wrong password or a bad gateway address. It is neither. The dialog in Ubuntu 22.04 validates a field that older releases did not require, and that field sits on a page most people never open. Here is the order that gets a profile saved, and what to do when the dialog refuses anyway.

Step 1: open Advanced before you look for a mistake

The missing value is the tunnel interface name, which lives under Advanced and carries no marker at all. Fill the main page as usual, then open Advanced and set the interface name to tun0 before pressing Add. If the button is still disabled after that, you have hit the second half of the same validation problem rather than a new one, so continue to the next step instead of retyping credentials. The behaviour is a form bug in the 22.04 packages, not a property of the account or of the gateway.

If you are already inside nm-connection-editor, the same page is called Advanced and the button you are trying to enable is Save.

Step 2: apply the Advanced page twice

With nm-connection-editor open, create a Cisco Compatible VPN (vpnc) connection, fill the gateway and group fields, set the tunnel interface name, and press Apply on the advanced page. Then press Apply a second time, or tick and untick the hybrid authentication option, which forces the form to revalidate. On the machines I have done this on, Save stays disabled after the first Apply and only re-enables after that second pass.

The second Apply is not superstition. It is the difference between a dialog that has validated the advanced page and one that has only stored it.

Step 3: find the profile after it saves

A saved vpnc profile may not appear in the GNOME Settings list, which makes a successful fix look like a failure. Check the system menu instead, where the connection is usually present and can be selected or edited normally. If it is missing from both places, close the editor completely and rebuild the profile rather than editing the half-saved one.

Once it connects, the profile is a normal NetworkManager connection, so later edits go through the same editor and the same quirk can return.

If the dialog still refuses, write a vpnc profile

The command-line client is a better fit for servers and for anyone who has run out of patience with the form. Create a profile with the fields vpnc expects, keep it readable only by root because it contains the group secret, then connect and disconnect with the client's own commands:

IPSec gateway vpn.example.net
IPSec ID GROUPNAME
IPSec secret GROUPSECRET
IKE Authmode psk
Xauth username your.name
Xauth password YOURPASSWORD

Save it as /etc/vpnc/work.conf with mode 600, run sudo vpnc work.conf to connect, and sudo vpnc-disconnect to tear it down. The script installs routes and resolver settings as part of connecting, which is convenient and also means a failed teardown can leave state behind.

Verify the tunnel, not the button

Confirm three things after connecting: the interface exists, the remote subnet has a route, and a name inside the remote network resolves. Then disconnect and confirm that the route and the resolver entries are gone, so the next connection starts from a clean state rather than from leftovers. A connection that reports success while the route table is unchanged has not finished its job.

Do not reinstall the distribution because a dialog button is disabled. That is a large response to a validation bug, and it does not change what the form requires.

Note which field your saved profile needed. A later editor build may stop requiring it, and the note tells the next person why the value is there.