Logging into my university's VPN

[quiver]

Ok, I'm basically appealing for a basic solution to something that on windows is a *extremely* basic. I'm running Gentoo 2.6.10 on a laptop, and wish to log into my University's VPN. They didn't actually list the VPN details on their site because most people just download an 800kb preconfigured executable that logs them straight in from winbloze. So I emailed them and they replied; "The Nortel VPN/Wireless client uses IKE for key exchange and IPSEC."

So, can someone please tell me that there's a simpler way than compiling IPSEC support, downloading ipsec tools and openswan, and configuring all the above... Considering that I'm not actually trying to bridge two or more networks here, I just want to log into one, not NAT across one!

Is there an easy way?

Cheers

[M4tth3wV]

look for a or ask for a Nortel linux client.

My company has Cisco VPN and cisco makes a vpn client for linux.

[tuxmin]

You'll definitely need a native Linux client fr the VPN server.
Even if you would find your way through all this IPSEC stuff under Linux it most probably will lead to nothing as IPSEC is merely a framework that does not specify the encryption and authentication schemes (as far as I remember not even the higher level protocols).
Thus almost any IPSEC implementation can be regarded as proprietary.
Unfortunately I can't tell how adaptive the Linux implementation of IPSEC really is, but you will need extensive information about the server's implementation to get it running at all.

Hth, Alex!!!
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