Howto: Ubuntu 10.10 + Juniper Network VPN

So work has me using Network Connect from Juniper to VPN into the internal network. I got it to work on almost every platform except my Ubuntu 10.10 Sony Ultralight. After hours and hours of banging my head I finally figured it out.

1) Network Connect does not like to use openjdk-6-jre which comes default on Ubuntu. I had to install sun-java.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:sun-java-community-team/sun-java6
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts

Select Sun Java as your default Java. (don't know if this is necessary)

sudo update-alternatives --config java

2) There seems to be some sort of bug with Firefox and Network Connect which never initializes the Java applet. And I couldn't get the Official Java to work with Firefox. So I had to use Chromium, which is fine with me. I like Chromium.

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

3) If you're anything like me, you tried to install Network Connect a billion times. Delete the ~/.juniper_networks/ in your home directory. Content and all. Just in case some sort of funkiness happened with your settings.

cd ~/.juniper_networks
rm -rf *
cd ..
rmdir .juniper_networks

4) Juniper's install script requires su. So put a password on the root user.

sudo passwd

5) Open Chromium. Type "about:plugins" in the url bar. Click on disable for "IcedTea NPR Web Browser Plugin" and make sure "Java(TM) Plug-in" is enabled.

6) Go to your company's VPN page, start up VPN, type in the root password of your system, and wa-la! It works. Well, it worked for me. I might be missing a step or two because I typed all this from memory. So let me know if you find any errors or can't get it to work.

Take care,