What does the form field »Enter Auth username« during the boot proccess mean?

Since I upgraded to Ubuntu 15.04 my system shows a strange behaviour booting: Shortly after the Ubuntu boot splash a form element shows up requiring me to enter an »Auth username«. The boot process stucks, until I would hit enter. What is that, where does it come from, how can I get rid of it?

That's how in looks like:

+------------------------------------------+
|                                          |
|                                          |
|                                          |
|                                          |
|                 Ubuntu°                  |
|                 ....                     |
|                                          |
|                                          |
|                                          |
|           Enter Auth Username            |
|           +------------------+           |
|           |                  |           |
|           +------------------+           |
|                                          |
|                                          |
|                                          |
|                                          |
|                                          |
+------------------------------------------+

I encountered this same issue and managed to resolve it. I first opened the OpenVPN init script with:

sudo nano /etc/default/openvpn

And uncommented the line:

AUTOSTART="none"

This should stop all OpenVPN connections on startup and thus resolves the issue without actually removing OpenVPN.


The problem was caused by some configurations file in /etc/openvpn. I don't know why the problem came only up after an upgrade to Ubuntu 15.04 as those files had been a long time before there. But actually, if you don't run an openvpn server or have some important openvpn configurations you can easily delete all those files with:

sudo rm -R /etc/openvpn/*

If you want to do a backup first, consider running something like this:

sudo tar -czf /etc/openvpn/

I got the prompt at boot time:

> Enter Auth UserName:

I figured out after some time that it is the openvpn server/service starting up (if you try to stop and start the openvpn.service in systemctl, you will get prompted for a password). So, if you only need the client to connect from this current machine to another server, you can disable the service like so (Debian 9, Ubuntu 18.04):

# systemctl disable openvpn.service