Automatically bring up openvpn connection when network online?

It appears cnetworkmanager has been replaced by nmcli http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/maverick/man1/nmcli.1.html

Ref. cnetworkmanager git repo. http://repo.or.cz/w/cnetworkmanager.git

Thanks Thomas Krüger, that solved my question.

By way of a quick epilogue,

// Start script

#!/bin/sh

set -e

if [ "$METHOD" = loopback ]; then
 exit 0
fi

/bin/su precise -c '/usr/bin/nmcli con up id "acevpn-premium-udp-faster - UK"'
# man page not clear as to --timeout units

// End script

placed into /etc/network/if-up.d works fine (though I couldn't get sudo to work for some odd reason, ref. this thread https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sudo/+question/205305/).

Could this be tied to the 'Connect automatically' VPN configuration checkbox, which as far as I can make out is currently unused?

Also to tidy up and stop the VPN connection broken message appearing, an if-down script (/etc/network/if-down.d scripts it seems run after the network connection has already been taken down).

Another footnote - the user 'precise' has to be logged in for the above script to work (i.e., typically the user who brought the interface up in the first instance). There doesn't seem on the face of it to be any way otherwise of knowing which user called the script at the point (the NetworkManager applet would probably have to be recoded to manage all this).

Some more points:

1) if-up.d scripts are not called when Ubuntu boots, so when a user logs in it is to a network connection that does not have the VPN running

2) if the VPN connection goes down (without the network interface itself going down), then in the same way that a service is brought back up again, NetworkManager could do to do so likewise

Maybe OpenVPN could be installed as a service but not started in the first instance, with some user code to bring the service up on login and to then manage the connection.