I am still running Bluefin and Bazzite on my computers (and loving it). I’ve got Bluefin on my work laptop and Bazzite on my personal desktop. Being a freelancer, the lines between work and personal sometimes blur so I have less separation between my environments than I did when I was a full time employee. Most of my separation now is less physical and hardware based but more focused on containers and virtualization.

Even with things being a little more mixed for me than they have been in the past, I still try to keep more stability on my work laptop than I would on my desktop where I spend time tinkering and playing games. I let Bazzite stay pretty fresh but my Bluefin install is a bit older, basically frozen to the last October 2025 release.

Occasionally I need to connect to a Meraki VPN for one of my clients. In order to set this up with network manager, I had to install xl2tpd. Sometime around November, my desktop updated itself and I was no longer able to connect to the VPN. I ended up with a bunch of errors that went something like netlink send: sendmsg: permission denied.

After some searching, I landed on this bug, which I thought was my issue. I installed the module mentioned but it didn’t fix my problem. I thought perhaps SELinux was being too restrictive so I set it to permissive mode for the moment: sudo semanage permissive -a l2tpd_t.

This fixed my initial permission errors with SELinux but yielded errors about missing files: netlink receive: no such file or directory. It turned out to be because the l2tp_ppp/netlink modules were blacklisted. I resolved that with a bit of a shotgun approach out of frustration:
sudo sed -i 's/^blacklist l2tp/#blacklist l2tp/g' /etc/modprobe.d/l2tp_netlink-blacklist.conf and then I loaded the modules:

sudo modprobe l2tp_ppp
sudo modprobe l2tp_netlink

Once that was done, everything connected just fine. My work machine with Bluefin is still running the October release so I don’t need to make any changes there. I have ordered new machines in fear of the RAM price hikes so I’m sure I’ll be doing this whole process all over again. I just wish I had made installation notes for how I got network-manager working with this VPN in the first place. Always be documenting…