Tatva-Artha

There are a few gotchas when setting up cisco vpn client on ubuntu. For cisco vpn, you need 5 pieces of information from your server.

Host, groupId, groupPassword, Username, password

Usually these pieces of information is supplied by your company (or your vpn host) in the form of *.pcf file. This is a text file that you can open up and read. The passwords are usually stored in this file in encrypted format.

When setting up cisco vpn client on ubuntu, following steps are needed:

Install the Cisco VPN client

$ sudo apt-get install vpnc

Install the Network Manager Tool for Cisco VPN:

$ sudo apt-get install network-manager-vpnc

With the above 2 setup you should be able to fire network-manager (nm-editor?) and configure VPN from the GUI. However, in my case this didn’t work (the VPN tab didn’t show as expected in the editor window). Also there is a minor bug with network-manager-vpnc where it cannot load the encrypted groupPassword from .pcf file. So, I had to resort to command line setup.

This entailed creating VPN config file /etc/vpnc/myConfig.conf

IPSec gateway <vpnHost>
IPSec ID <groupId>
IPSec secret <groupPassword>
#IKE Authmode hybrid
Xauth username <username>
Xauth password <password>

The gotcha here is you need to privide clear text passwords for groupPassword and <password>. If you are only given .pcf file from your provider, you have encrypted groupPassword. This groupPassword is not highly secure and can be decoded as explained here.

Once this file is set, execute the following command _as root_.

$ vpnc myConfig

This should get you connected to your provider successfully.

To disconnect,

$ vpnc-disconnect

Enjoy.

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