Connecting to Fortinet VPN from a Linux client
Modified on: Wed, Apr 2 2025 10:34 AMConnecting to the Marquette VPN is necessary for accessing certain on-campus resources.
Due to the variety of desktops and graphical interfaces on Linux, this guide will be written with terminal commands, but you can use your desktop's graphical tools to configure the VPN connection.
Prerequisites
To connect to the VPN from Linux, you need a Linux machine with openconnect installed.
You can check your openconnect version with this command:
If it is not installed, install it with your distribution's password manager.
This guide assumes you have sudo rights on the machine.
Starting the VPN
To start the VPN, run this command:
You will be prompted for your sudo credentials and your Marquette credentials in that order.
Once you enter your Marquette password, you will get a multi-factor authentication prompt in Microsoft Authenticator. Refer to ITS' article about the VPN for Authenticator setup.
Do not close the terminal window.
Please note that this is not a split tunnel VPN - meaning that all your network traffic will be routed through Marquette when you connect with this method.
You may want to save this command as an alias or script if you are frequently connecting to the VPN from a Linux client.
Stopping the VPN
To stop the VPN, open the terminal window that you started the VPN in and hit Control+C to interrupt the process and disconnect.