Information Technolgy Services provide a simple to use Virtual Private Network (VPN) service for all students and staff at The University of Melbourne (UoM). This service allows a remote user to access network services hosted on campus that are unavailable to hosts not on a local university network, these might typically include multi-user servers, file shares and intranet sites. ITS provide detailed instructions for users of Windows, Mac OS X and various mobile operating systems. Some users have expressed concern that installing and using an AnyConnect service on Linux is problematic. Engineering IT have produced this document to assist users with Linux-based operating systems correctly installing and using an AnyConnect client.
For detailed instructions on using the UoM Cisco AnyConnect service from Windows, Mac OS X or your mobile device, please visit ITS Accessing network off-campus : Staff Hub pages (requires login).
The Cisco AnyConnect client can and does work on Linux-based operating systems and you a free to download and install it using its insall shell script, however, the open source community has produced an AnyConnect SSL VPN compatible client called OpenConnect which will be available for in your modern Linux-based OS. For this document, we've used the latest Ubuntu 14.04 Desktop distribution as an example. The following should show you step-by-step how to install and configure OpenConnect for the UoM AnyConnect VPN service.
Follow these steps and refer to the screenshots to install OpenConnect, some basic knowledge of your Linux-based operating system is assumed.
$ sudo apt-get install openconnect network-manager-openconnect network-manager-openconnect-gnome