As part of a discussion with a colleague, he said that he needed to build an installer for his shop’s F5 Network’s VPN service but wasn’t sure how. I hadn’t built one of these previously either, so I decided to look into it.
Fortunately, F5 Networks has made the process of creating one a fairly straightforward process, assuming that your VPN administrator can provide the needed config_tmp.f5c configuration file. Assuming that you can get that file, all that’s needed is making sure that the config_tmp.f5c file is located in the same directory as the VPN client installer.
The reason for this is that the postinstall scripts of the F5 VPN client installer are set to look for that file in that location, and will automatically import the configuration file’s contents if the file is found.
Once I had both the config_tmp.f5c config file and a copy of the F5 VPN client installer, I was able to create an installer using this method that handled both the installation and the automated configuration of the F5 VPN client. For more details, see below the jump.
Prerequisites:
- Packages
- The F5 VPN client installer (provided by your VPN administrator)
- The appropriate config_tmp.f5c config file (provided by your VPN administrator)
1. Set up a new Packages project and select Raw Package.
2. In this case, I’m naming the project F5 BIG-IP VPN Client
3. Once the Packages project opens, click on the Project tab. You’ll want to make sure that the your information is correctly set here (if you don’t know what to put in, check the Help menu for the Packages User Guide. The information you need is in Chapter 4 – Configuring a project.)
In this example, I’m not changing any of the options from what is set by default.
4. Next, click on the Settings tab. In the case of my project, I want to install with root privileges and not require a logout, restart or shutdown.
To accomplish this, I’m choosing the following options in the Settings section:
- In the Post-Installation Behavior section, set On Success: to Do Nothing
- In the Options section, check the box for Require admin password for installation.
5. Click on the Scripts tab in your Packages project.
6. Select the F5 VPN client installer and drag it into the Additional Resources section of your Packages project.
7. Select the config_tmp.f5c config file and drag it into the Additional Resources section of your Packages project.
8. The last piece is telling the F5 VPN installer to run. For this, you’ll need a postinstall script. Here’s the one I’m using:
9. Once you’ve got the postinstall script built, run the following command to make the script executable:
sudo chmod a+x /path/to/postinstall
10. Once completed, add the postinstall script to your Packages project.
11. Last step, go ahead and build the package. (If you don’t know to build, check the Help menu for the Packages User Guide. The information you need is in Chapter 3 – Creating a raw package project and Chapter 10 – Building a project.)
Testing the installer
Once the package has been built, test it by taking it to a test machine that does not have the F5 VPN client and install it. The end result should be that the F5 VPN client installs along with the specified VPN configuration.
