Springe zum Hauptinhalt

Lukas Döllerer

Personal Webpage

Setup NUS SoC VPN on Linux 2022 - The Missing Guide

This inofficial guide provides the commands necessary to connect to the SoC (School of Computing) VPN at NUS (National University of Singapore). It is complementary to the official guide which is unfortunately missing instructions for linux users.

Prerequisites

The tool required for the vpn connection is openfortivpn. The following linux distributions provide pre-build packages for your comfort (just a copy-paste from the linked GitHub repo):

  • Fedora / CentOS

  • openSUSE / SLE

  • Gentoo

  • NixOS

  • Arch Linux

  • Debian

  • Ubuntu

  • Solus

Installation for Ubuntu / Debian

Just an example, this command is used for ubuntu / debian distributions:

sudo apt install openfortivpn

If you are using any of the other distros, you should already know how to install your packages.

Start VPN Connection (Command Line)

The following command will start the VPN connection with the command line based util.

sudo openfortivpn webvpn.comp.nus.edu.sg --username=<YOUR-NUSNET-ID>

After hitting ENTER, you should be prompted for your NUSNET password by your favorite pinentry application. Be sure to include the sudo and use your NUSNET-ID without the domain specifier.

Ubuntu NetworkManager VPN Connection

The VPN can also be stored as a connection in the ubuntu NetworkManager (tested with version 1.36.6).

  1. Open the "Connections"-settings, either from the network tray icon or from system settings

  2. Click the + Button "Add new connection"

  3. Select "Fortinet SSLVPN (fortisslvpn)"

  4. Gateway is "webvpn.comp.nus.edu.sg"

  5. User name is your NUSNET ID

  6. Password your NUSNET password

  7. Don't change anything else.