Juniper SSL VPN on Slackware 11

Juniper's VPN client isn't compatable with Slackware 11, but with a little bit of effort it can be made to work.

This is based on the instructions at ContinuousThinking which were for Ubuntu / Debian, rather than for Slackware.

If you've done a complete install of Slackware 11 then you should have all the libraries apart from libcrypto which you can get from www.linuxpackages.net.

Don't forget to run ldconfig as root after installing libcrypto.

Now we follow the instructions at ContinuousThinking

• login into your Juniper SSL VPN homepage
• Click the Network Connect Start button
• A pop-up will appear saying “Loading Network Connect Client. Please wait”
• An xterm window will appear with the title installNC.sh which will prompt you for a password.
• CTRL-D at the password prompt and when asked to try again answer ‘N’.
• Logout from the SSL VPN homepage and close Firefox/Mozilla/Konqueror.
• Open a shell and do the following…

$ cd ~/.juniper_networks
rm -rf network_connect
cp -R tmp network_connect
cd network_connect
chmod 744 *.sh

# NOTE: if you haven't configured SUDO then also run:
#
# su
#
# and remove the "sudo" command from the start of the
# remainder of the commands

sudo chmod 6711 ncsvc
sudo chown root:root ncsvc

At this point their instructions are pretty much complete - apart from giving instructions on manually starting the ncsvc service before launching the Juniper client. To enable the client to start it automatically we must do the following:

sudo chmod +s ncsvc
sudo mkdir /dev/net
sudo mknod /dev/net/tun c 10 200

This also creates the tun network device that the client also requires.

You may want to add the last two lines into /etc/rc.d/rc.local to make sure that the device node is created at every reboot.

When you next select Network Connect Start you'll get an “RPM query for openssl failed”. After clicking Ok the network connect dialog appears and should connect OK.