For those of us that need to connect to clients/partners that use the Cisco VPN utility, getting it to work on Linux can sometimes be a bit of a mission. Luckily the Open Source World always has one or more alternatives. In this case, ShrewSoft VPN.
Follow the steps in this guide carefully and you’ll have the client working and running in no time.
Please note, this post is an adaption of this StackExchange question/answer.
Step 1: Download the required shrewsoft package – v2.2.1 as of the time of this article – to your working directory. I will use /var/tmp as my working directory in this tutorial
cd /var/tmp wget https://www.shrew.net/download/ike/ike-2.2.1-release.tgz |
Step 2: Untar
tar -zxvf ike-2.2.1-release.tgz |
Step 3: Install dependencies (there are a number)
sudo apt-get install cmake libqt4-core libqt4-dev libqt4-gui libedit-dev libssl-dev checkinstall |
Step 4: Build the install files
cd /var/tmp/ike cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DQTGUI=YES -DETCDIR=/etc -DNATT=YES |
Step 5: Install the application
sudo checkinstall -y |
Step 6: Create the config file
sudo cp /var/tmp/ike/source/iked/iked.conf.sample /etc/iked.conf |
Step 7: Start the ike deamon
sudo iked |
Step 8: Start the graphical user interface (gui) and use ShrewSoft!
sudo qikea |
Step 9 (optional): Create a shortcut on your desktop to the gui
cd ~/Desktop ln -s /usr/bin/qikea Shrewsoft |
Now you can just launch the client from the desktop. Enjoy!
You forgot a few other packages like flex and bison, so the full apt-get install line would be:
sudo apt-get install -y cmake libqt4-core libqt4-dev libqt4-gui libedit-dev libssl-dev checkinstall flex bison