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Friday, 2 September 2005

Cisco VPN client installer destroys /opt

I haven’t seen this complained about very much, but see here. If you run recent versions of the Mac OS X Cisco VPN client installer, it will destroy the permissions on the contents of /opt, and turn /opt into a symbolic link to /private/opt for no good reason. I’m currently restoring my DarwinPorts setup from a backup.

Luckily, the one reason I needed to use the campus VPN is gone (dcsfiles.cs.uiuc.edu supported only SMB access, which is firewalled, and not WebDAV/SSL, which works now). Unfortunately, despite the usability of vpnc, I couldn’t get it to work on OS X; after a bit of minor source hacking, the tunnel would be set up and the routes established but nothing would go through it.

* 1:41 PM | Computing, macOS

5 comments on “Cisco VPN client installer destroys /opt”

  1. ssp
    2 September 2005 | 2:15 PM

    I didn’t have a folder /opt or /private/opt before on my system and the Cisco installer just created /opt. And I think it’s quite annoying as it isn’t invisible and thus I now have an ugly (and pretty useless) Unix folder spoiling the top level of my drive.

    I wonder how the people at Cisco managed to make the experience of their product even worse than it used to be…

  2. VPN-user
    13 September 2005 | 8:36 PM

    A hint for you darwinport users when installing cisco vpn.
    Move /opt temporarily to /opt-temp.

    Install the client.

    Remove the symlink

    rm /opt

    Then move back you old opt.

    mv /opt-temp /opt

    Now you only need to create a symlink to the vpn client.

    cd /opt
    ln -s /private/opt/cisco-vpnclient .

    You are done!

  3. colin charles blog » Blog Archive » Bad Cisco VPN client
    27 September 2005 | 5:09 PM

    […] Then I try the OS X version. And lo and behold, I read that it destroys /opt where DarwinPorts tends to live. In fact, thats not the only damage that it does: it symlinks var to private/var and tmp to private/tmp. Don’t even think of moving var, as err, you’ll slowly realise your sudo options don’t work. Apple+S into single user mode, then mount -uw /, to recreate the var symlink. Bad cisco, bad 4.7.00.0510 release. […]

  4. Tobias
    28 September 2005 | 5:04 AM

    Hi.
    I managed to get vpnc working on Mac Os X, including the vpnc-script. I’ve posted the tar-file with the code on http://www.cl.uni-heidelberg.de/~tbender/software/ and a short instruction…

    If you have further quiestions, feel free to ask.

    Tobias

  5. Mark
    1 July 2006 | 3:32 PM

    This has been resolved in 4.9. Cisco installs in /private

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