I would like to ask the group a question regarding a program VPN program called VpncGui 5.4.4 (by Juha V. Aalto) . The VPN setup which I am running requires the client to connect to the VPN concentrator while "disabling dead peer detection". VpncGui currently connects to the VPN with no problem, but after 5 - 10 minutes VpncGui disconnects since I cannot seem to disable dead peer detection in
VpncGui. VpncGu relies on Vpnc which is a command-line tool. This is done easily on the command line using "vpnc --dpd-idle=0".

I am wondering if I can somehow add the "--dpd-idle=0" switch to the VpncGui command line. Would this require recompiling VpncGui or perhaps changing a configuration file for VpncGui?

The source code appears to be available here at this address: http://maemo.org/packages/package_in.../vpngui/5.4.4/

Please be so kind to point me in the right direction. I have emailed the author of the program but have not received a response back.

As a workaround how about renaming the vpnc binary and replacing it with a shell script that adds that commandline option? Maybe something like this (untested):

Thank you for your response, stlpaul.

I have implemented your suggestion, and vpncgui does connect properly... now the real test is whether or not I will be kicked off the VPN.... if I will not get kicked off, then the dead peer detection has been properly turned off using the method indicated above... I will update this thread with the hopefully good results this evening...

As a side note, a great feature of vpncgui is the ability to define an HTTP (web) proxy from within the GUI, and somehow the browser (MicroB) automatically uses that web oroxy when the VPN is connected! It must somehow integrate with the MicroB browser, since this does not happen for FireFox, Chromimum, Links (texl-only browser) or Iceweasel. I thought this was very interesting.

I am happy to report back that the solution which stlpaul presented works perfectly. Once again stlpaul proved to be the "go to" person on VPN issues with the N900.

Additionally, I did receive a response from the developers of the VpnGui program (Gabor Fekete and Aalto Juha of Nokia), they indicated another way of making this happen:

Use VI to edit the /usr/sbin/vpngui-helper file and add the custom VPN options to the CMD environment variable:

CMD="/usr/sbin/vpnc $*"

Glad it worked, and thanks for posting the vpncgui devs solution as well. I think their solution is better because it won't be disrupted by a future update of the vpnc package.