I need to use a third party web service which is accessible only through Cisco AnyConnect VPN. I'm using OpenConnect on Ubuntu to connect to this VPN using host, username, and password.

However, instead of having to manually connect every time we need to connect to the service (since the service is being consumed by a script that runs on daily basis), I would like to set it up once and have itself reconnect when the tunnel breaks.

Is there a way for us to connect openconnect client (or any other similar client for Cisco AnyConnect) to automatically reconnect when the connection breaks.

Alternatively, is there a way to login without username and password and store that configuration somewhere so we can automatically respawn the process when it stops.

Please note that this is all on a server, so no GUI.

3 Answers

See the options it has. openconnect --help:

-u,--user=NAME
Set login username to NAME
--passwd-on-stdin
Read password from standard input
--reconnect-timeout
Keep reconnect attempts until so many seconds have elapsed.
The default timeout is 300 seconds, which means that openconnect
can recover VPN connection after a temporary network
downtime of 300 seconds.

it also supports a

--config=CONFIGFILE

---

There are several scripts on-line you can adapt to your situation.

I created a script to do this, you must change DEVICE_NAME, SERVER_ADDRESS, USERNAME and PASSWORD_FILE_PATH to a file that contains your password

You can find the name of your VPN device with /sbin/ifconfig.

#!/bin/bash
if ! /sbin/ifconfig | grep -q 'DEVICE_NAME'; then sudo openconnect -b -q SERVER_ADDRESS -u 'USERNAME' --passwd-on-stdin < PASSWORD_FILE_PATH
fi

i use a service file

/etc/systemd/system/myVpn.service

[Unit]
Description=My Vpn Connection
After=network.target
[Service]
Type=simple
Environment=password=correcthorsebatterystaple ExecStart=/bin/sh -c 'echo YourPasswordHere | sudo openconnect --protocol=nc YourServerHere --user=YourUserHere --passwd-on-stdin'
Restart=always

then I just run it with

systemctl start myVpn

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