Saturday, October 20, 2012

VPN in Ubuntu and Upgrading to 12.10, Quantal Quetzal

The latest release of Ubuntu hit the news a couple of days ago. I have been hesitant upgrading for some time as I have become less enthusiastic about new operating system features since moving away from system level development.

My experiences following Ubuntu has been that, every time a new release comes out, some functions are broken. Over time, bugs get reported, updates released and broken functions repaired. It has been a great OS for years, although Unity has not been my favorite. Between Gnome and KDE, I have always liked Gnome better, so I have stayed with Ubuntu, using it on my desktop, my netbook, and home server.

After reading about the 12.10 release for a few days, I decided to upgrade my desktop. The upgrade went pretty smooth besides taking a while. I went the command line route as that was easier for me.

Before I started the upgrade process, I had to enable the upgrade to a non-long-term-support (LTS) release -- Ubuntu does 2 release every year, one in April and one in October, which is where the release numbers like 10.04 and 12.10 come from. The latest release, 12.10, means it is released in October 2012. I forgot the file containing that option, so I started the System Tools » Administration » Update Manager, went to Settings and change the Notify me of a new Ubuntu version option from For long-term support versions to For any new version.

Then in a terminal window, I did a do-release-upgrade. That's pretty much it -- all I had to do after than was answering a few questions about new configuration files -- Since I haven't done much customization, I only had to answer y.

The upgrade process kept all my personalizations, including my choice of Gnome 3 and background images, etc.

But then almost immediately after reboot into 12.10, I noticed something not working: My VPN to work. It is a Cisco AnyConnect setup. The Network Manager isn't much help -- it just says connection failed. In syslog, this one message looks quite suspicious: Failed to open tun device: Permission denied -- I checked /dev/net/tun, I should already have read and write access to it per group permissions. Only by granting world read/write access to the tun device seems to make VPN work -- That seems rather strange. But that's a story for another day.

2 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. +Joseph wills - You mean Ubuntu upgrades? Or my problem with VPN?

      Ubuntu (the company is Canonical, actually) publishes upgrades quite frequently, that usually include patches, bug fixes, etc. But new, numbered, releases only come out twice a year.

      The VPN problem, however, seems to be new. I remember that I had to write my own script to get it to work at 10.04 but it started to work right out of the box when I upgraded to 12.04.

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