OpenConnect with PAN GlobalProtect support

Table of Contents

• What is this?
  • Feedback and troubleshooting
  • Installation
    • Building from source on Linux
    • Building on the Mac
  • Connecting
  • Portal vs. gateway servers

What is this?

This is a modified version of the fantastic open-source VPN client OpenConnect which supports the PAN GlobalProtect VPN in its native modes (SSL and ESP)—with no assistance or cooperation needed from your VPN administrators.

Feedback and troubleshooting

This is a work in progress.

That said, I've been using it for real work for many weeks, and it works very well for me.

Having other people test it would be awesome and I welcome your feedback! Please report any problems here on Github rather than bothering the OpenConnect mailing list, since this is not part of any official OpenConnect release.

If you are having trouble authenticating to your GlobalProtect server, please run OpenConnect with the --dump -vvv flags to dump the authentication flow; please compare the back-and-forth configuration requests to this anonymized transcript and include information about relevant differences in your issue report.

Installation

Please refer to the build requirements for the official releases of OpenConnect. This version has the exact same build dependencies as OpenConnect v7.06; modern versions of autoconf, automake, gcc, libxml, etc.

Building from source on Linux

Under Debian-based or Ubuntu-based distributions, this should install the requirements:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential gettext autoconf automake libproxy-dev libxml2-dev libtool vpnc-scripts pkg-config \
                       libgnutls-dev # may be named libgnutls28-dev on some recent Debian/Ubuntu-based distros

Once you have all the build dependencies installed, checkout and build the globalprotect branch from this repository.

$ git clone https://github.com/dlenski/openconnect.git
$ cd openconnect
$ git checkout globalprotect
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

Building on the Mac

Homebrew is required. To build and install into /usr/local:

$ brew install pkg-config gettext gnutls lz4
$ export LIBTOOLIZE=glibtoolize
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-vpnc-script=/usr/local/etc/vpnc-script --disable-nls
$ make
$ make install

Please see this Gist on how to set up and use OpenConnect on the Mac. Don't forget to install vpnc-script into /usr/local/etc.

Connecting

Run openconnect like this to test it with your GlobalProtect VPN provider. (Include --certificate cert_with_privkey.pem if your VPN requires a client certificate and/or private key.)

$ ./openconnect --protocol=gp server.company.com --dump -vvv
Please enter your username and password.
Username:
Password:

Currently it only supports username, password, and optionally client certificate authentication… since that's the only example I have. But I'd welcome feedback if there are other authentication methods in use out there.

Portal vs. gateway servers

For my VPN, the VPN tunnel server is the same as the VPN "portal" server, but your VPN may differ. Try using both the "Portal address" and the "GlobalProtect Gateway IP" shown in the Windows client with OpenConnect:

[]

You can also use get-globalprotect-config.py to list the available gateway servers:

$ ./get-globalprotect-config.py [--cert client_cert_with_privkey.pem] portal.company.com
        ...
        <gateways>
                <cutoff-time>5</cutoff-time>
                <external>
                        <list>
                                <entry name="gateway.company.com">
                                        <priority>1</priority>
                                        <manual>yes</manual>
                                        <description>WowSuchGateway</description>
                                </entry>
                        </list>
                </external>
        </gateways>
        ...