Summary

This document provides a step-by-step approach in order to successfully establish SSL VPN connections in Enterprise mode from Fedora 11 machines and access the resources that are being protected by SSLVPN.

Problem

Fedora 11 is not an officially supported platform for Novell SSL VPN. Any attempt to establish the SSL VPN connection fails to get installed on Fedora 11 as the SSL VPN client binaries are specific to SUSE Linux Enterprise Servers.

When SSLVPN connection is tried on Fedora 11 using Firefox browser, the users are likely to encounter the error shown in Figure 1:

Click to view.

Figure 1: Error while connecting to Novell SSL VPN

Solution

In order to enable the Novell SSL VPN connection on Fedora 11, the client binaries have to be manually downloaded and installed.

Follow the steps given below on Fedora 11 to connect to SSL VPN in enterprise mode:

1. Link the libssl.so and libcypto.so files by using soft links as shown in the Figure 2.
   
   
   

   

   
   Click to view.
   
   Figure 2: Linking of files
   
   

• Download /var/opt/novell/tomcat5/webapps/sslvpn/linux/novell-sslvpn-serv.tar.gz file on to Fedora 11 from the SSLVPN server.

• Untar novell-sslvpn-serv.tar.gz and install the extracted rpm as shown in Figure 3:
  
  
  

  

  
  Click to view.
  
  Figure 3: Downloading and Installing the service
  
  
  
  (The above figure shows an example where 'novell-sslvpn-serv.tar.gz' service file is being downloaded from SSLVPN server with IP address 192.168.30.86 using SCP)

• After the installation, novell-sslvpn-service, the init file is created under /etc/init.d/ directory.

• Overwrite the init script /etc/init.d/novell-sslvpn-service with the script available at the following link: novell-sslvpn-service.zip
  

  $cp <attached script> /etc/init.d/novell-sslvpn-service

  
  (The provided script is also called 'novell-sslvpn-service' )

• Execute the commands shown in Figure 4 to start the Novell SSL VPN service on Fedora 11:
  
  
  

  

  
  Click to view.
  
  Figure 4: Bringing up Novell SSL VPN service on Fedora 11
  
  
  
  You will now be able to establish a successful SSL VPN connection in Enterprise mode on Fedora 11 using Firefox.
  
  
  

  

  
  Click to view.
  
  Figure 5: Successful Novell SSL VPN connection establishment on Fedora 11
  
  

The above figure depicts successful SSLVPN connection using Firefox 3.5.4