Tuesday, November 15, 2011

vpnc sh: /etc/vpn/vpnc-script: Permission denied

    I use vpnc to login to my company VPN(Cisco). It was all working fine. Recently, I had changed my laptop and so I had to install vpnc again. After installing vpnc when I tried to connect, it threw me a 'permission denied' error as shown below:

[root@raghu-ti8105 raghu]# vpnc ./vpn
Enter password for raghu@mycompany.com:
sh: /etc/vpnc/vpnc-script: Permission denied
sh: /etc/vpnc/vpnc-script: Permission denied
VPNC started in background (pid: 6986)...
[root@raghu-ti8105 raghu]#

    I searched the internet and found a few 'permission denied' threads however nothing worked for me. To make it work, I decided to login using the Windows Cisco VPN Client. Once connected, I can convert the profile(*.pcf) file using 'pcf2vpnc' script to a vpnc conf file and try again with vpnc.

    I was able to login from Windows however it still didn't work with vpnc. That's when I decided to look closely at the error.

    It was a 'permission denied' error from the shell. The user running did not have permission to run the script!!!

    The solution was to allow the owner of the script to execute.

chmod u+x /etc/vpnc/vpnc-script

    After running the above command, I ran vpnc again.

[root@raghu-ti8105 raghu]# vpnc ./vpn
Enter password for raghu@mycompany.com:
Connect Banner:
| UNAUTHORIZED USERS WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW.
|

VPNC started in background (pid: 7260)...
[root@raghu-ti8105 raghu]#


Note: I believe by default the
/etc/vpnc/vpnc-script is installed with execute privilege for the owner but it did not happen in my case, not sure why.

7 comments:

  1. Nice Dude. It worked for me.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Worked for me as well.....Thanks!!1

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  3. Thank you. It worked for me as well

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  4. Thanks, this caught me out after a reinstall, forgot to change permissions and make the script executable.

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  5. I dont know why, but it doesn't work for me. I have an Glibox (Yellow).

    ReplyDelete