These are the unofficial instructions for using openfortivpn to remotely connect to the University of Akron network. Openfortivpn is a command line client available on macOS and many linux distributions. These instructions may vary slightly on different platforms. These unofficial instructions were written by me personally, not as an employee or representative of UAkron. Use at your own risk, I'm not liable for anything you do.
openfortivpn is available for macOS and a wide variety of Linux distributions. For a list of packages, visit the install section of the openfortivpn Github repository or visit repology for a more complete list of packages. Package installation will vary per platform. Here is an example command of using APT to install openfortivpn on Ubuntu and Debian-based distros.
sudo apt install openfortivpn
You can check if it's installed by running:
openfortivpn --version
Attempt to log in to the VPN using
sudo openfortivpn vpn.uakron.edu:443 -u [UANetID]
It should error out and give a line saying trusted-cert = [a very long hexadecimal number]. Copy the hex number.
The login command from before can be used with the added agument of the trusted-cert and the hex number, which looks like:
sudo openfortivpn vpn.uakron.edu:443 -u [UANetID] --trusted-cert [copied hex number]
However it may be more convienent to save this in a configuration file that can be used when logging in, instead of writing all of these arguments whenever you need to connect.
The VPN will remain connected while the terminal window is open, to end the process press Ctrl+C in the terminal, this should end the process and close the connection.
A basic text file (with no file extension) can be created to contain the configuration information for the vpn such that the file can be used as a convienent alternative instead of all of the arguments like before.
We'll create a configuration file called UAkron-VPN in the default config file directory of /etc/openfortivpn/.
To do this using the nano text editor, enter:
sudo nano /etc/openfortivpn/UAkron-VPN
Once nano is open with the new empty file, fill out the file like so:
host = vpn.uakron.edu
port = 443
username = [UANetID]
trusted-cert = [copied hex number]
On nano, hit Ctrl+O to save and Ctrl+X to exit.
Now you should be able to run the vpn with the configuration file, which looks like this:
sudo openfortivpn -c /etc/openfortivpn/UAkron-VPN