Maastricht University VPN on Debian systems

Source: Wikipedia.

Nuno Nunes showed me today how to use the Maastricht University VPN. I rarely use it, because EZProxy for reading literature. But VPNs have huge benefits when working on public networks. The figure on the right side shows the idea: all your internet activity goes via the UM network, with all the advantages of that. Moreover, if I understood correctly, all traffic between you and UM is encrypted, solving public network concerns.

Turns out it takes less time than to write this blog post:

$ sudo apt-get install openconnect
$ sudo openconnect vpn.maastrichtuniversity.nl

There are graphical ways of doing this too, but I prefer the command line. This is for Debian GNU/Linux, but should be similar for other platforms, particularly the second step.

Update: I also found the --user= and --passwd-on-stdin options very useful.