Encounter with VPN

July 9, 2017

The reason behind developing this project was to ease the process of connecting to VPN. In my daily work I constantly required a VPN connection, Cisco AnyConnect client was the obvious choice but because I was facing some issues installing the same in Ubuntu so instead I choose openconnect. After following below-mentioned step, I am now able to get connected to a VPN using few mouse clicks.

System Requirements

Currently I have tested this only on ubuntu 16.04, hopefully, in coming days I will be adding installation instruction for other OS too.

Installation

Install expect using this command: sudo apt-get install expect

Steps for installing openconnect:
First run command below to active th TUN module: sudo /sbin/modprobe tun
Install OpenConnect: sudo apt-get install openconnect

Download this module and make openconnect script executable like this: chmod +x /path/to/openconnect.sh

Change these variables: GATEWAY, UBUNTUPASSWORD, USERNAME, PASSWORD present in script (openconnect.sh) as per your environment.

Run the script like this: ./openconnect.sh, this is when you are in the root directory of the module otherwise add path to your module.

Now we have to install Nautilus-Actions Configuration Tool, type this in the terminal: sudo apt-get install nautilus-actions

Launch the Nautilus-Actions Configuration Tool from the Dash after installing it.

dash_nautilus

First, click the New Action button on the toolbar and type the name of your action into the Context Label box, may be something like this: Connect to VPN

nautilus_action

Click the Command tab and in Label box enter any suitable name like VPN and in Path box this: /usr/local/bin/vpn

nautilus_command

Since we would need terminal for executing our newly created vpn command, in nautilus-actions tool, go to Edit > Preferences > Runtime Execution. In the "command pattern" field, enter: gnome-terminal -x sh -c COMMAND

nautilus_preference

Now we need to restart nautilus typing this command in the terminal: nautilus -q

After this you can access your newly created vpn command on right clicking under Nautilus-Actions actions.

click_nautilus

Link to repo. Happy browsing