I upgraded to Intrepid Ibex long before I should have... Hardy Heron(8.04) is an amazing release, where 8.10 seems to have a lot of fine tuning still needed. I reinstalled back to Hardy yesterday on my laptop because of some issues with wireless (Intel 4965 - 802.11n), suspend wasn't as great any longer, and vpnc wasn't working. I also had upgraded my Mythtv/Router box as well... and now I wish I could take that back, however that ones not an easy reinstall, so I'll work with it for now.
anyway, after my reinstall back to hardy, my vpn is still not working, and I get the error: vpnc: receiving packet: Message too long
After some googling and not turning up anything, I decided to launch wireshark on my laptop and watch while I ran my vpnc-connect. Turns out the Message too long is a rather obscure way of saying that it was getting an ICMP fragment error... the IPSEC packet was set not to fragment and the packet was to large for some MTU setting on my uplink some where. I thought I'd check my router box... which has three nic's in it... one for wireless, one for wired lan, the third is my internet(eth0). Since it was doing the same thing on both wired and wireless, I checked eth0 which is where it plugs into the cable modem. Sure enough the MTU size on eth0 was set to 576 bits. I ran "
sudo ifconfig eth0 mtu 1500" and tried my vpn connection again and it connects. My cable has been up and down all week (Thanks Comcast!), it could be an issue with the cable modem or it could just be the new kernel in intrepid ibex... so, for now, I'll add the following line in /etc/rc.local
ifconfig eth0 mtu 1500
this sets the MTU to 1500 on boot(if it wasn't DHCP I could add an
mtu 1500 line for the interface in /etc/network/interfaces)
Last night i decided that running the server kernel for the PAE mods isn't really a good fix on my new ThinkPad T61, so I installed the 64bit version of Ubuntu.
I had a few issues with getting the Cisco VPN client installed but found these
instructions to help.
1. Untar the VPN Client
# tar xzf vpnclient-linux-4.8.01.0640-k9.tar.gz
2. Download the patch #1
# wget -q http://projects.tuxx-home.at/ciscovpn/patches/vpnclient-linux-2.6.24-final.diff
3. Download the patch #2
# wget -q http://projects.tuxx-home.at/ciscovpn/patches/cisco_skbuff_offset.patch
4. Change to the vpnclient diretory
# cd vpnclient
5. Apply the patch #1
# patch <../vpnclient-linux-2.6.24-final.diff
patching file GenDefs.h
patching file interceptor.c
6. Apply the patch #2
# patch <../cisco_skbuff_offset.patch
patching file frag.c
patching file interceptor.c
Hunk #1 succeeded at 646 (offset 16 lines).
Hunk #2 succeeded at 685 (offset 16 lines).
Hunk #3 succeeded at 807 (offset 16 lines).
patching file linuxcniapi.c
patching file linuxkernelapi.c
7. Open your "Makefile" and rename the CFLAGS line to EXTRA_CFLAGS
8. Now the patches have been applied and you can safely install the client
#./vpn_install
