amccormack.net

One of my Kali VMs crashed earlier and when I brought it back up and tried to start the Cisco AnyConnect VPN I got the following error:

/opt/cisco/anyconnect# ./bin/vpn connect
Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client (version 3.1.05187) .

Copyright (c) 2004 - 2013 Cisco Systems, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.


  >> error: VPN Service not available.
    unable to attach to VPN subsystem!

The problem is that the VPN subsytem needs to be started before launching /opt/cisco/anyconnect/bin/vpn or /opt/cisco/anyconnect/bin/vpnui

The VPN subsytem is started with the vpnagentd binary:

/opt/cisco/anyconnect/bin# ./vpnagentd
/opt/cisco/anyconnect/bin# ./vpnui

And after starting /opt/cisco/anyconnect/bin/vpnagentd, everything works as expected.