Monday, May 5, 2008

Reinstalling Cisco vpnclient on Ubuntu 8.04

I had recently upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 on my office workstation. While this is a quite interesting move, some of my custom installed modules have stopped working or removed. This includes vim, eclipse europa etc. The latest to join the list of broken packages is vpnclient. I tried to reinstall vpnclient. While the installation itself went through fine, when I tried to start, it failed with the following error.

sharmi@sharmi:~/Downloads/vpnclient$ sudo /etc/init.d/vpnclient_init start
Starting /opt/cisco-vpnclient/bin/vpnclient: insmod: error inserting '/lib/modules/2.6.24-16-386/CiscoVPN/cisco_ipsec.ko': -1 Invalid module format
Failed (insmod)


That is when I learnt about the new patch required to run the vpnclient with in Ubuntu 8.04

So to reinstall, I will assume that the vpnclient is already downloaded and untarred.
  1. Update the linux-headers to version 2.6.24-16-386 (also called kernel-headers in some distributions)
    • Start the Synaptic Package Manager: System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager
    • search for 'linux-headers'. Choose linux-headers-2.6.24-16-386 for installation
  2. To apply the patch and install vpnclient
This worked for me :) Hope it helps you too ..