VPN woes
Well, I am getting fed up with trying to get a vpn client working. Admittedly, I’m not trying too hard – I hardly ever take my laptop into uni any more anyway, with its pitiful 1 hour battery life – but it would be nice.
First off I tried the Cisco vpn client from the uni website–with its copious ‘This is not officially supported’ warnings. I couldn’t get it to compile properly, and even later versions that were uploaded helpfully by IS after I e-mailed them broke in the same way (some rubbish error about an unexpected “(” on line 43 or something). There were patches available, according to google. I tried these, and managed to get one version installed, or thereabouts. Still no luck.
The ‘free’ version is a plugin for nm-applet, called vpnc. This, I have found, just doesn’t work. Perhaps I’m just stupid and don’t know how to use it. I imported the configuration file and went into college. Trying it out simply crashed nm-applet. I was still connected to the college wireless network, but the little icon was gone and wouldn’t restart.
So, I tried installing the Cisco client again. Finally, I was managing to get it to install. Only problem was, after I’d installed it, it refused to start, saying some essential module was missing (it wasn’t; it was right there where it should have been, and modprobe couldn’t find it either). I restarted my computer for some reason, probably because all this messing about with rubbish proprietary crap and messing with kernel modules was simply too much for it to bear. (Nautilus wouldn’t start, and even clicking the big red ‘quit’ button did nothing, in fact. I suppose I should have run top and found out what process was hogging resources, but hey.)
The restart worked, and I could now start the vpn client. Only problem was, even with the profile there, I couldn’t for the life of me connect to the vpn, and the error message suggested it was a client-side problem.
Ho hum. I’ll try and find time to see the IS guys at some point.
