FortiClient VPN not connecting on Ubuntu: Backup routing table failed

Hello fabio-C,

Thank you for using the Community Forum. I will seek to get you an answer or help. We will reply to this thread with an update as soon as possible.

Thanks,

Hello fabio-C,

I found this document:

https://docs.fortinet.com/document/forticlient/7.0.1/linux-release-notes/213138/install-forticlient-linux-from-repo-fortinet-com

Could you please tell me if it helped?

If not, we will find another solution to reply to your answer.

Regards,

@Redtree 22.04 is also a LTS version of Ubuntu btw ;)

However there was a thread in hiere about installing FortiClient from .deb on a different but also debian based linux (I forgot about the name).

In this case it was unmet dependencies that prevented Forticlient .deb from being installed as some packages had been removed from the standard repositories. That could be workarounded by getting those packages from the debian buster repos and manually install them. After that FortiCLient was able to install and worked fine so far.

I would need to search for that thread.

And to the initial issue here: accoarding to the error thrown by FortiClient that could be permission issues. Since the routing table is not a physical file maybe it's an issue of apparmor being to restrictive. I ran into some similar issue in Ubuntu with Strongswan not being able to add the dns provided via mode_config to my resolve.conf due to too restrictive apparmor profile...

I found that thread again: https://community.fortinet.com/t5/Fortinet-Forum/VPN-installation-on-Linux-dependency-problem/td-p/208686

maybe looking not only at the logs of FortiClient but also into /var/log/syslog, /var/log/daemon.log or /var/log/messages might provide some clue on what fails here.

Hello, my solution was as follows:

https://kifarunix.com/install-forticlient-vpn-client-on-ubuntu-20-04-ubuntu-18-04/

I tried multiple options and it was the only one that worked for me.

Best regards

Version 6.4.0.0851 works on Ubuntu 22.04 after installing libindicator7. The latest versions 7.0.0.18 doesn't work. Tried it with deb installation and with apt installation. 

This is the solution that has worked in my case using ubuntu 22.04 and forticlient 7.0.3.

First, Forticlient tries to flush the DNS cache with the 'systemd-resolve' program which no longer exists in Ubuntu 22.04 (it has been replaced by 'resolvectl').
So we create a script '/usr/bin/systemd-resolve' with the following content:

#!/bin/bash

declare -a arguments

for i in "$@"; do
    arguments+=(${i:2})
done

resolvectl ${arguments[@]}
sleep 10

Forticlient executes the command 'systemd-resolve --flush-caches' which the script transforms into 'resolvectl flush-caches'. Without the final 'sleep' in my case it kept failing. With this most of the time the VPN connection works

i have the same problem with an additional behavior, if i connect the pc to wifi via mobile usb tethering it works, but if i connect the pc direct to lan it did not work. none of the above suggestions have worked. Any ideas?

Unfortunately, nothing here fixed the issue for me. I'm now on Mint 21 (based on Ubuntu 22.04) and I've already got the latest version of Forticlient VPN and the latest versions of libappindicator1 and libindicator7. I've reinstalled all three, but it still won't connect. "vpn_connection:1263 Backup routing table failed" is the error I keep getting.  Any ideas?

UPDATE: Since writing the above, I've now come into the office and am on a different WiFi network, and when I woke my computer, FortiClient connected!  I've no idea what's different on this network, but it always used to work on the other one too.  I'll see if it reconnects when I'm next online at home.