SOLVED: vpnc and resolvconf

I've been using vpnc to connect to a Cisco 3000 VPN Concentrator. Since upgrading from Dapper Drake to Hardy Heron I noticed that after about 20 minutes domain name resolution would fail even though the VPN was still up.

It turned out that /etc/resolv.conf we being overwritten by the DHCP client when the DHCP lease expired (and needed renewal).

The solution was to install the resolvconf package, which manages /etc/resolv.conf.

vpnc drops connection after apparent inactivity

I have been successfully using vpnc to provide a VPN connectivity on Ubuntu Dapper Drake. However, it seemed to drop the connection more frequently than I was used to when using the Cisco client vpn-client.

This tended to coincide with periods of inactivity so I tried running a periodic ping

ping -i ip-host

and the problem appears to have been solved.

vpnc - Cisco VPN Client

I needed a client to access work's Cisco VPN client. Apparently, the official client from Cisco (version 4.8 or later) can be built to run on Dapper Drake. However, there is an open source alternative vpnc, for which there is an apt package.

I installed the vpnc package and it ran (sudo) without any problems. As an added bonus (unlike the official client) vpnc doesn't disable LAN traffic, is not a kernel module and doesn't require recompilation with each kernel upgrade.