On Fridays, I work from home, to prevent wasting time commuting. So today, I started out fresh, ready to rock and roll. But alas, I was off to a slow start.

To access my company’s resources, I use a Virtual Private Network (VPN). In particular, I use the VPN client software from Cisco on Ubuntu GNU/Linux. This piece of software has the tendency to break on every kernel update, however 😦 Yes, you guessed right, this week I received a kernel update to 2.6.24-17.

When I previously upgraded Ubuntu to 8.04, I received kernel 2.6.24-16 and then the VPN client broke as well. I had to apply a patch, which didn’t work: it couldn’t apply all changes. I then manually fixed the code to make sure all the changes in the patch were applied. And then the VPN client finally worked.

So I expected another one of those sessions. But this time, googling turned up nothing. Since I’m close to a deadline, I decided to simply restart my computer and choose the 2.6.24-16 kernel from the GRUB boot menu. Since it used to work with this kernel, I expected it to work now. But no such luck. I still got an error about the Connection Manager being unable to read the connection entry.

Getting a bit desperate, I redid the VPN client installation. Now it worked 😀 Feeling lucky, I rebooted into kernel 2.6.24-17, and it still worked. Sometimes I just don’t understand computers…

Update 2008-08-15: Check out this page with Unofficial Cisco VPN Client Updates for Linux.