Connecting to IPSec VPN gateways has always been one of the more painful things to do. Unfortunately Cisco is not helping by being extremely sluggish on making their utilities available on most recent OS revisions (you can’t even get their QuickVPN client to work properly on 64bit Win7 yet). Operating System support outside of Windows seems to be pretty much non-existent (see https://supportforums.cisco.com/thread/2040595).

Shame on you Cisco !

Option 1 – running QuickVPN under using wine

Download the QuickVPN client

http://www.cisco.com/cisco/software/type.html?mdfid=282414013&flowid=787

Install using wine

wine setup.exe

Copy the QuickVPN Client Certificate to the QuickVPN program folder and run

cp RVS4000_Client.pem ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Cisco\ Small\ Business/QuickVPN\ Client/
cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Cisco\ Small\ Business/QuickVPN\ Client/
wine VPNClient.exe

Option 2 – vpnc connection

apt-get install vpnc openconnect  network-manager-vpnc  network-manager-openconnect

Theoretically it should be possible to connect to the Cisco Small Business Routers using vpnc (& openconnect). However there is ZERO information from Cisco as to the settings and the QuickVPN utility seems to use some non-standard authentication and handshake mechanisms.

I would love to hear from anybody who was able to connect using native (and standard) Linux VPN utilities rather than the wine hack above.

Leo Gaggl

ict business owner specialising in mobile learning systems. interests: sustainability, internet of things, ict for development, open innovation, agriculture

This Post Has One Comment

  1. Raúl Valencia

    Hello,

    I managed to succesfully connect an Ubuntu 14.04 box to a Cisco RV016 Small Business VPN router on a client-to-gateway config. (By now, Cisco SB routers are rebranded Linksys ones)

    The software that worked is the Shrew Soft VPN client. It is available on the Ubuntu default repositories, and also on the ones of other distributions, the product is Open Source.

    There is a guide on how to connect a LinkSys router with a Shrew Soft client on a client-to-gateway config:

    https://www.shrew.net/support/Howto_Linksys

    Good luck!

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