VPN How-To for Linux

This is a brief how-to designed to get you exactly what you need to connect to the VPN network here on UCLA campus.

VPN, you say?!?

Yes, VPN. Officially known as a Virtual Private Network, by connecting to a VPN, one can create a tunneled connection through a public and insecure network. The entry point to the VPN network at UCLA begins at the Cisco 3030 VPN concentrator located at vpn.ucla.edu. The package vpnc was made specifically for connecting to these types of concentrators. This tutorial will show you how to connect to the VPN in three easy steps. This tutorial also assumes the user is using the UCLALUG's recommended distro, Ubuntu. Consult your distro documentation on how to do the following commands on your distribution.

On Debian-based systems (Debian, Ubuntu):

$ apt-get install vpnc

On Red Hat-based systems (Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS):

$ yum install vpnc

Yes! vpnc should be installed.

This will ask for you to log into BOL to download the file.

I suggest using the script pcf2vpnc. Conversion appears to be more than just simply copy-pasta, so I heavily recommend using this script to generate the configuration file.

$ pcf2vpnc UCLAVPN.pcf > vpnc.conf

This saves the converted vpnc configuration file to vpnc.conf. You will have to edit this file by including your username and password where the file denotes <your username> and <your password>. As a sidenote, I would recommend writing only your username into the configuration file and not your BOL password, in the unlikely case someone can read that file. As a final step you need to move the configuration file to where vpnc can read it. The following command moves it to where VPNC (8) suggests /etc/vpnc/default.conf

$ mv vpnc.conf /etc/vpnc/default.conf

and…

You're done!

After connecting to the wireless, or gaining access to the internet type in vpnc and supply your BOL password. Congratulations, your datumz are secure.

If you'd like to go through the tutorial yourself (e.g., generating your own vpnc.conf), then you'll need these files:

• uclavpn.pcf - the BOL VPN PCF file.
• pcf2vpnc.pl - the pcf2vpnc Perl script.
• cisco-decrypt.c - source code for cisco-decrypt, which is needed for pcf2vpnc utility.
  • Requires libgcrypt (try apt-get install libgcrypt-dev)
  • Compile with:

gcc -Wall -o cisco-decrypt cisco-decrypt.c $(libgcrypt-config --libs --cflags)

• cisco-decrypt.zip - compiled cisco-decrypt binary.