Solaris 10 Sparc equivalent of Cisco AnyConnect
 

Hi!

I'm trying to connect to a corporate VPN from a Sparc machine with Solaris 10. I'd like to use the Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client because that's what I use when I connect from a Windows machine, and all it requires is my domain\username and password. But the AnyConnect client is not available for Solaris.

What I've done so far:

1. I tried the 'regular' Cisco VPN client (not AnyConnect), but it requires either a 'groupname/group password' or certificates - neither of which are available for my corporate VPN.

2. I looked at OpenVPN, but that appears to be a VPN server, whereas I need a VPN client.

3. I looked at OpenConnect, but I could not find a pre-built binary for Solaris Sparc, and I don't really want to try to build my own if possible.


Any/all suggestions welcome!

You might ask your VPN team what they allow.

In my organization they only authorize certain MACs to connect so even if I have the CiscoAnyConnect on another devicces(say a personal laptop) it wouldn't work because the VPN policy doesn't recognize its MAC. I'm only allowed to connect using the company provided laptop.

Hi MensaWater,

Thank you for your response. In my case, there is no MAC restriction. I think my problem is really about finding a Solaris VPN client that has behaviour similar to Cisco AnyConnect on Windows, i.e. a VPN client that allows me to connect with domain/username/password and not groupname/grouppwd.

Thanks again.

Your best bet is probably building openconnect from source.

Solaris is listed as supported, although SPARC is not mentioned.
http://www.polarhome.com:793/doc/ope...platforms.html

You would need the Tap driver too:
http://www.whiteboard.ne.jp/~admin2/tuntap/

Thanks for your post jlliagre.

Even though I'm a software engineer with 15+ years experience, I don't have a lot of Unix knowledge and so as I feared, I almost immediately got bogged down with (to me) incomprehensible library dependency/version issues and compiler errors. After hours of googling and trying everything I could, I'm giving up.

Thanks again for your feedback.

FYI: I also posted this question over at 'The UNIX and Linux Forums':
http://www.unix.com/solaris/250389-s...nyconnect.html
Different suggestions there but still no solution unfortunately.

Porting opensource to other platforms is often a bear because you're using the native tools of the platform. Sometimes installing gcc+ then using that for your compiles of opensource source gives better results.

I wrote building from source was your best bet, I should have mentioned it might not be an easy task ... In any case, I'm afraid all other approaches are doomed.

• It seems no ready made package exists on the web.
• AnyConnect doesn't support Solaris on SPARC.
• The java version looks to be just an launcher.

Your only option is then to compile from source. You might try asking for help in the OpenConnect mailing list, see http://www.infradead.org/openconnect/mail.html

Why would you not want to build your own? It should build fairly cleanly out of the box. I don't test on Solaris/SPARC but I do test on Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 on x86, and other big-endian platforms are also supported; there shouldn't be any endianness bugs.

Send email to the mailing list as others have suggested, if you have issues. You don't need to subscribe.