I thought that I'd already replied but I don't see my reply. Thanks for the reply. You were correct. My openvpn noobyness certainly showed. Interestingly openvpn server starts automatically on my Ubuntu Trusty desktop i.e. without my invoking it. How does that happen?
I just tried to test starting openvpn client on my Ubuntu Trusty laptop and it refused:
john@Laptop:~$ openvpn --remote 88.97.74.226 --comp-lzo --dev tun --auth-user-pass --ca /etc/openvpn/ca.crt --client
Sat Apr 11 11:23:14 2015 OpenVPN 2.3.2 x86_64-pc-linux-gnu [SSL (OpenSSL)] [LZO] [EPOLL] [PKCS11] [eurephia] [MH] [IPv6] built on Dec 1 2014
Enter Auth Username:john
Enter Auth Password:
Sat Apr 11 11:23:23 2015 WARNING: No server certificate verification method has been enabled. See
http://openvpn.net/howto.html#mitm for more info.
Sat Apr 11 11:23:23 2015 UDPv4 link local (bound): [undef]
Sat Apr 11 11:23:23 2015 UDPv4 link remote: [AF_INET]88.97.74.226:1194
Sat Apr 11 11:23:23 2015 WARNING: this configuration may cache passwords in memory -- use the auth-nocache option to prevent this
Sat Apr 11 11:23:24 2015 [VPNServer] Peer Connection Initiated with [AF_INET]88.97.74.226:1194
Sat Apr 11 11:23:26 2015 ERROR: Cannot ioctl TUNSETIFF tun: Operation not permitted (errno=1)
Sat Apr 11 11:23:26 2015 Exiting due to fatal error
Any ideas on diagnosing this error?