Installing Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client on Ubuntu
Introduction
Whenever I tried to install Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client on Ubuntu, I will have problems installing the software or fail to start the program for the first time. In this blog post, I documented the simple protocol of installing Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client on Ubuntu.
Platform
- Ubuntu 18.04/20.04 LTS
- Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client 4.5.0
Installation
Prerequisites
1 | $ sudo apt-get install network-manager-openconnect libpangox-1.0-0 libcanberra-gtk-module |
Install VPN Client
Download VPN client from your company or a certain trusted website. For NVIDIA employees, we use https://www.nvidia.com/content/includes/anyconnect.html. Unzip the file and goes into the directory of the folder.
1 | $ cd ./vpn |
Verify Installation
1 | $ /opt/cisco/anyconnect/bin/vpnui |
If there are missing components that are causing the failure of AnyConnect to start, we will get error or warning messages from the terminal. Then we could use this information for further troubleshooting.
Caveats
In some scenarios, Cisco AnyConnect drops connections frequently. We would use OpenConnect instead.
Installing OpenConnect is extremely simple.
1 | $ sudo apt-get update |
To start the VPN connection using OpenConnect, we would run the following command.
1 | $ sudo openconnect --protocol=anyconnect --authgroup=employee --user=<username> --background <server> |
Enter the password per request.
Installing Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client on Ubuntu