Alternative applications for Cisco VPN client on Ubuntu 10.10

Question

I use Cisco Systems' VPN Client v5.0 on Windows 7 to connect to my work environment. My VPN profile is available as a PCF file. I would occasionally like to use Ubuntu 10.10. Are there any applications that support connecting to a VPN server from Ubuntu.

Answer 1

If you install the network-manager-vpnc and then network-manager-vpnc-gnome or network-manager-vpnc-kde packages, you'll have a GUI config interface for setting up a Cisco-compatible VPN connection using vpnc (more info on it is at http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~massar/vpnc/ ).

You may also want to install the vpnc package in order to get a pcf2vpnc utility that'll try to convert the PCF file over.

Answer 2

After installing the network-manager-vpnc and network-manager-vpnc-gnome packages, I kept getting the error:

 The VPN connection 'xxxxx' failed because there were no valid VPN secrets. 

It turns out that the solution to that problem is to restart the Network Manager

  sudo restart network-manager
  sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

After following the answer provided by @Cos, and following the restart instructions, my VPN is now functioning.

Answer 3

I seem to recall the built-in network manager has support for Cisco VPNs, once the correct package is installed.

Try:

apt-cache search network | grep manager -i

I believe the package is something like "networkmanager-cisco".

Once that is installed, you should be able to add a VPN connection using the normal network manager window.

Answer 4

vpnc is the VPN choice for me. It's pretty simple to use through the command line (which I am assuming you are comfortable with or at least interested in using since you use Ubuntu).

The following should work fine:

sudo apt-get install vpnc

If not, you can install from source: http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~massar/vpnc/vpnc-0.5.3.tar.gz