Post-upgrade first World problems are here.

A friend who recently upgraded to Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus LTS told me that Cisco AnyConnect VPN doesn’t work anymore. So I wanted to give it a try.

In Ubuntu 14.04 what you’d normally do is installing the three packages network-manager-openconnect, network-manager-openconnect-gnome and openconnect (or may be two of them – can’t recall).

However, this no longer works. You can install the packages but you will no longer see the “Cisco AnyConnect compatible” OpenConnect option when you attempt to create a new VPN connection.

What now? Back to basics!

Hit Ctrl+T to get a terminal and here’s all what you have to do:

$ sudo openconnect --setuid=`id -u` --user=shaakunthala vpn.provider.com

• Replace shaakunthala with your username in the VPN server.
• Replace vpn.provider.com with your actual VPN provider’s hostname.

Hit Ctrl+C to disconnect.

Surf and enjoy!