Using vpnc with the University of Heidelberg

Tags: freebsd, howtos

Published on Tuesday, April 18, 2006

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Some online services the University of Heidelberg offers are only available if you are a part of their VPN. I don’t want to use one of these crappy Cisco-tools, but fortunately there is vpnc.

Assuming the installation worked fine, you just have to enter the information in /usr/local/etc/vpnc.conf. It looks like that:

IPSec gateway vpnsrv1.urz.uni-heidelberg.de
IPSec ID tunnel
IPSec secret "group pass"
Xauth username "your login"@uni-heidelberg.de
Xauth password "your pass"

Unfortunately, they don’t tell you the group password. But you can decode it once you have downloaded the configuration file from the “URZ” homepage.

I needn’t tell you that the decoder mustn’t be used for malicious activity…so just have fun.