Cisco VPN, vpnc and Ubuntu upgrades

I get to do a little work from home here and there. And, I was happy to get my VPN account this fall with my new job. But, knowing that I usually just remote control my workstation at the office to do some of the work, I don't really need to boot into Windows to do this. After all, Ubuntu has a Terminal Server client that will support remote controlling a Windows box. I've done so at home. I had finally got the guts enough to install the Cisco VPN client on Ubuntu. I got it working and all was well with the world for some time.

Earlier this week, I ran some of the suggested Ubuntu updates, which gave me a new kernel version, now sitting at 2.6.24-22-generic. That broke the Cisco VPN client. And, I couldn't figure out why or how to fix it. I tried rebooting, reinstalling, etc. No love. It would start up the vpnclient, but would not be able to read my PCF (connection configuration thinger) file.

I did some searching and found a solution that worked for me. There is a package out there called vpnc. You can install vpnc using apt:

sudo apt-get install vpnc

Once you install it, you will need to convert your PCF file to get the host and address info it requires, You do this using pfc2vpnc. It's a Perl script. It should be installed and you can use it like so:

NOTE: I had copied my pcf file to my home directory. This just tells the Perl script to read it and output the results.

cd /usr/share/vpnc
./pcf2vpnc ~/myPCFFile.pcf

## generated by pcf2vpnc
IPSec ID theipsecid
IPSec gateway something.foo.com
IPSec secret ipsecsecret

IKE Authmode psk

## To add your username and password,
## use the following lines:
# Xauth username
# Xauth password

So, it didn't write that to a file that I could see. So, I wrote it down in a file to keep it handy. Once you have that, you just just start up vpnc and connect.
NOTE: I haven't been able to specify a separate config file yet, so I just typed it all. At least it works.

$ sudo vpnc
Enter IPSec gateway address: something.foo.com
Enter IPSec ID for something.foo.com: theipsecid
Enter IPSec secret for theipsecid@something.foo.com: ipsecsecret
Enter username for something.foo.com: myusername
Enter password for myusername@something.foo.com: pin and/or pass for vpn
VPNC started in background

Now you're connected to work. Or, at least I was.
So, I have to enter those 3 IPSec things for now. That's more than before. But, I'm sure with some tinkering I can figure out how to automate that out of the process and only have to enter my username and pass each time.

Good luck!