GlobalProtect VPN at Colorado State University

In order to be able to access CSU resources off campus or ssh into my work desktop I need to install the GlobalProtect VPN. The installation of the VPN client is pretty straightforward. In this post I'm keeping notes on how to install the CLI version of the client.

First things first, we need to download the university's VPN package here.

This should download a file called PanGPLinux-6.0.0-c18.tgz. We need to unpack this file. In order to do that I generated a pkgs folder and moved the .tgz file.

We can unpack it from the command line with the following command.

tar -xvf ~/pkgs/PanGPLinux-6.0.0.tgz

The result of this should be a series of .deb, .rpm, and .gz files in the pkgs folder. If you are using an Ubuntu-based operating system you can now install the VPN client with this command:

sudo dpkg -i <gp-app-pkg>

In my case this was:

sudo dpkg -i GlobalProtect_deb-6.0.0.1-44.deb

After the installation is complete you can connect to the CSU network with:

globalprotect connect --portal gateway.colostate.edu 

If you get the following error:

Failed to connect to gateway.colostate.edu.
Error: Default browser is not enabled.

you need to stop the client:

sudo systemctl stop gpd.service

add the code below to your /opt/paloaltonetworks/globalprotect/pangps.xml

<Settings>
<disable-globalprotect>0</disable-globalprotect>
<regioncode>10.0.0.0-10.255.255.255</regioncode>
<default-browser>yes</default-browser>
</Settings>

after saving reboot the system.