Connecting to VPN outside of MIT (Platform independent)

Although the IST website gives a good description of how VPN may be used outside of MIT to connect to the private network for things like the matlab license server, working from home in general, etc... the directions and downloads are specific to windows and red hat (rpm) platforms. The following instructions are for a debian (Ubuntu) machine that you may find helpful.

The basic idea is to give you a tar ball of the vpn client (that is not platform specific like the one here) and explain how to set it up to use a modified .pcf file different from the one given here.


Update 110308: If you are using Ubuntu version 8.04 with kernel version 2.6.24.x, you will need a different patch. Please refer to this reference

You will need to download the following:

Now follow the following steps:
  1. Unzip the tarball:
    tar xzf vpnclient-linux-4.8.00.0490-k9.tar.gz
    This creates a directory vpnclient
  2. Move the patch file, vpnclient-linux-2.6.22.diff to the vpnclient directory and stay in the directory vpnclient
  3. Apply the patch:
    patch < vpnclient-linux-2.6.22.diff
  4. Install the vpnclient from inside the vpnclient directory:
    sudo ./vpn_install
    The defaults for this install are OK and you might get some errors but its not a big deal.
  5. Move the MIT.pcf file to the /etc/opt/cisco-vpnclient/Profiles/ directory
  6. Start the VPN client:
    sudo /etc/init.d/vpnclient_init start
  7. Now connect to the VPN with the following command:
    sudo vpnclient connect MIT
After this, you will need to use Kerberos login name and password to get in. If you haven't changed your password in a while, it might be a good idea to do that. You might run into errors by not doing so.

If this doesn't help you out or you run into errors.. try these references: