Cisco VPN Client on Fedora Core 5

I finally got around to getting my Cisco vpnclient working again after upgrading from FC4 to FC5. After the upgrade and a reinstall of the vpnclient, I was getting error messages like this:

# ./vpnclient_init start
Starting /opt/cisco-vpnclient/bin/vpnclient: insmod: error inserting '/lib/modules/2.6.15-1.2054_FC5/CiscoVPN/cisco_ipsec.ko': -1 Invalid module format
Failed (insmod)

I read elsewhere that this means it needs the linux headers, which would be the kernel-devel package. You can find out the kernel version you are running like this:

# uname -rm
2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 i686

I didn't know of an easy way to install automatically using yum since I'm not running the latest kernel version and yum wanted to install the newest package that doesn't match what I'm running. So...

I downloaded the kernel-devel rpm that I needed and then did a localinstall using yum:

yum localinstall kernel-devel-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5.i686.rpm

Did a reinstall of the Cisco vpnclient, ran the init.d start script as suggested by the installation notes, and - hooray! - it works again.

I'm running this version of the Cisco client, which was itself a pain in the ass to obtain because Cisco won't let me download it from them even though I've registered with them:

vpnclient-linux-4.8.00.0490-k9.tar.gz

I guess I'll wait and see if I get to go through all this great fun again next time I update my kernel...