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Feisty Fawn and VPNC
By klard | May 15, 2007
It is things like this that really make me wonder if linux can ever make it as a desktop replacement. The current version of Ubuntu was released with a known bug in vpnc 0.4.0. It appears that when using vpnc to connect to a Cisco easy vpn solution the dead peer detection drops the vpn tunnel after less than 1 minute. Now I was using vpnc on Edgy for months and never had an issue, after I upgraded to Fawn a few weeks ago I never could get the vpn to stay up long enough to accomplish anything. I thought for some time that the PIX I was connecting to was having some issues because at times in the past vpnc 0.3.3 would eventually cause the pix to hang and I would have to have it rebooted. Come to find out the current version of vpnc shipped with Fawn had a known flaw, yet it was released in the distribution anyway. Nice going.
The bigger issue is how to fix it. There are some instructions here about downloading the vpnc source and making a change. However, you have to enable “universe” in /etc/apt/sources.list in order to get the source. Then of course there was some problem trying to update the rules in binary and I kept getting this error “make: dh_testdir: Command not found” which I never was able to overcome. Then for awhile I tried to dpatch the source as it appears there is a patch included in the source, which of course there are no friggin instructions on how to do it. In the end I removed vpnc 0.4.0 and reinstall vpnc 0.3.3 using this package, with the caveat that I need to watch my updates and make sure 0.3.3 doesn’t get overwritten until it is fixed.
What a cluster. I consider myself reasonably well versed in some of this stuff, I cannot imagine a regular user trying to overcome the hurdles that are put out there even with the most user friendly distributions.
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