Ubuntu Openconnect Cisco Anyconnect

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Ubuntu Openconnect Cisco Anyconnect Download

Problem

With the openconnect network manager integration, all you really need is the gateway address - you also need that when you use the Cisco client. You can leave all other options at their defaults. When you connect, it'll ask for your username and password. (Tested on 18.10). The program openconnect connects to Cisco 'AnyConnect' VPN servers, which use standard TLS and DTLS protocols for data transport. The connection happens in two phases. The connection happens in two phases. You need to install network-manager-openconnect-gnome and restart (sudo service networking restart)the network-manager. A reboot will fix the problem too. Here are old articles about OpenConnect, the open source AnyConnect server: OpenConnect on Ubuntu Open Connect Server Configuration (Working for iOS) Cisco AnyConnect Client for OS X/Windows/Linux (Version 3.1.05160) This time, OCServ 0.80 on Ubuntu 14.04. And still doesn’t work for OS X. Cisco Anyconnect VPN client for Linux I looked at the instructions for installing the VPN client located here and it says that I can download the Anycast VPN client for Linux here. The problem is when I go to the link the only downloads that are available are for Mac and Windows.

I needed to maintain a continuous (or near-continuous) VPN connection to a server (server 1) from another server (server 2) that was running a Tomcat web-app (on Ubuntu Server 16.04). Server 1 was part of a network which provides secured VPN access to external connections via Cisco Anyconnect.

Solution

Users have reported that this approach does not work with newer version of openconnect etc.

Given I haven't attempted this approach (nor have need of it) I am just leaving this here for historical purposes (or something that did work previously).

For this, we're going to use the excellent OpenConnect to connect to server 1, and a bash script to continuously check the connection, and if disconnected, to reconnect.

Install OpenConnect

Let's first install OpenConnect. Server 2 was running Ubuntu 16.04. Let's do:

Ubuntu openconnect cisco anyconnect windows 10

Creating a script to reconnect when disconnected

Please note that the below approach stores a vpn password in clear text in the script file, and as such is a potential security risk. The script should be locked down to stop users without authorisation from viewing its contents. Hence, this approach may only be appropriate for a server/system that is strictly managed or not accessed by other users.

Let's create a script that will:

connect to your VPN;
check every x seconds whether it is still connected
reconnect to the VPN if the connection is broken

In the below example we'll create a vpn.sh script.

Copy the following into in your script:

Let's at least lock this file down to be only readable by root:

Running script in background

Once your happy with your script you can run said script as a background script:

Stopping background script

To stop/disconnect the VPN and script, use ps to find the PID's of the VPN script and the openconnect process by:

For example, on my system, running the above gives:

I would kill PID's 10525 and 28445, like this:

Split tunnelling with vpn-slice

Split tunnelling allows you to explicitly define the ip address(es) for which traffic will be routed to on the vpn server side. This is useful for situations where you might want to route traffic to/from a specific ip, and want all other traffic to use normal (non-vpn) connections.

For this use case you can use vpn-slice. Once installed (see here for requirements and install guide), you can then modify your the script above as follows (see line 15 for the vpn-slice script argument):

where <IP-ADDRESS> is the ip address (or addresses, separated by a space) is what addresses you want tunnelled to the vpn.

NOTE: you should install vpn-slice with sudo to ensure it is available on the standard path (otherwise you'll need to give the full path to the vpn-slice script).

References