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NetworkManager-anyconnect

NetworkManager-anyconnect is a VPN plugin for NetworkManager. It extends NetworkManager in a similar way to other VPN plugins and provides a wrapper to the proprietary Cisco AnyConnect VPN client.

Usage

Since NetworkManager-anyconnect provides a wrapper around the AnyConnect client, you should ensure that you can first connect via AnyConnect. Set up your certificates and connection using the proprietary client and test your connection. Once successfully set up and with NetworkManager-anyconnect installed on your system, you should see a Cisco AnyConnect option when adding a new VPN connection. Select this option to configure your VPN and you will be presented with the configuration screen (shown below). Configuration is very simple, since you have your certificates set up already you just need to choose the VPN gateway to connect to from the drop down list and give your VPN connection a name.

AnyConnect Configuration

Known Issue and Work Around

Whether you hit this problem will depend on two things being true:

  1. Your AnyConnect gateway needs to be configured to require downloading data to VPN clients
  2. Your NetworkManager must be started by systemd using ProtectHome=read-only

As outlined in the AnyConnect Manual, certificates must live in the ~/.cisco/ directory. Similarly, AnyConnect may download data from the VPN server during the connection attempt and if so, this downloaded data is also written to the ~/.cisco/ directory. However, in many Linux distributions the NetworkManager service is started with read-only access to the entire /home directory structure using the ProtectHome=read-only configuration from systemd. In these cases where AnyConnect needs to write to ~/.cisco/ but cannot, the connection attempt will fail.

The work-around for this issue is to move your certificates elsewhere within your home directory and create a ~/.cisco directory in another branch of the file system that is writeable to your user id. This can be achieved using the /var/tmp/ directory using the following commands that should be run under your own user ID (not root) as an example:

mv ~/.cisco ~/.cisco2
mkdir /var/tmp/${USER}-cisco
ln -s /var/tmp/${USER}-cisco ~/.cisco
ln -s ~/.cisco2/certificates /var/tmp/${USER}-cisco

The above commands:

  1. move your ~/.cisco/ directory out of the way so it can be replaced with a symbolic link
  2. create a new directory that will be writeable to NetworkManager sub-processes
  3. link the writeable directory from your ~/.cisco/ directory
  4. keep your certificates in your home directory and link those to the writeable directory (they will remain read-only)

The /var/tmp/ directory is recommended for this work-around since it is considered more persistent than /tmp/. However, you may find that the sub-directory you created there is wiped out from time to time so you may want to set something up perhaps with a systemd timer or cron to make sure the directory remains in place for when you need it for your VPN connections.

Building

You will need gcc and the GNU autotools installed on your build system. There is a autogen.sh script you can use to generate the required build files. Then it's the standard configure and make script you'd expect. The autogen.sh script is set to run the configure script but you may choose to reconfigure the build. An example is shown below:

cd NetworkManager-anyconnect
meson builddir
cd builddir
ninja
sudo ninja install

Building an RPM

There are a few ways to achieve this so here's an example to build an installable RPM file using mock to build a package (omit the first couple of commands if you've already run them):

cd NetworkManager-anyconnect
meson builddir
cd builddir
meson dist
rpmbuild -bs --define "_sourcedir meson-dist" NetworkManager-anyconnect.spec  --define "_srcrpmdir ." --undefine dist
mock --arch=x86_64 --resultdir="mock/NetworkManager-anyconnect-1.2.3-1" NetworkManager-anyconnect-1.2.3-1.src.rpm

Note 1: the meson dist command will only build a tar file from the currently committed code i.e. if you have local changes these will not be added to the build.

Note 2: the rpmbuild command will create a .src.rpm file in the current directory i.e. in your meson build directory

Note 3: the mock command will write all of it's output into the mock sub-directory (or as specified by --resultdir)

Building a SELinux RPM

Since the SELinux policy isn't required on all machines where NetworkManager-anyconnect could run, the policy is separate and a separate RPM can be created:

cd NetworkManager-anyconnect/rpm/selinux/
rpmbuild -bs --define "_sourcedir ." NetworkManager-anyconnect-selinux.spec  --define "_srcrpmdir ." --undefine dist
mock --arch=x86_64 --resultdir="mock/NetworkManager-anyconnect-selinux-1.0.0-1" NetworkManager-anyconnect-selinux-1.0.0-1.src.rpm