I use fedora core 10 on a linux server that I assign a static IP to. I also log into my work using PPTP on this same computer. While Network Manager seems to handle the static IP, I could not get it to bring up the PPTP session. I finally gave up and decided to configure the PPTP session manual.
I wrote 2 scripts: goWork and stopWork (note that Work is capitalized). I wanted to run this when I pressed an icon on the gnome tool bar but these scripts need to run as root. After some research, I found that I wanted to use /usr/bin/consolehelper.
To enable this I did the following (note there is a punch line at the end):
- Put goWork and stopWork in /usr/sbin.
- chmod 755 /usr/sbin/goWork and chmod 755 /usr/sbin/stopWork
- Added files named goWork and stopWork in /etc/security/console.apps
- Added files named goWork and stopWork in /etc/pam.d/
- Added links in /usr/bin pointing to consolehelper
- Added application-launchers on the gnome panel to goWork and stopWork
The problem is it didn’t work at all. There are a bunch of options in the /etc/security/console.apps and /etc/pam.d files so I got to spend hours trying different things out. Finally, I found something on the web stating that pam.d or consolehelper didn’t work with files with capital letters! I changed everything to gowork and stopwork and it all worked fine. Evidentally this is a long term problem (link) from 2005. Guess this explains why all the Fedora management utilities are named in lower case.