Does the --background option exist for Windows?

[Paolo Ienne (严保罗)]

In fact, I have a question: why there is no way to pass the password on 
the command line? Almost all my troubles depend from the use of 
--passwd-on-stdin and the difficulty to actually manage to pass it. Again, 
maybe I am dumb, but the only way I managed to pass the password on stdin 
on Windows has been to invoke tcsh with -c. Weirdly (to me) "echo 
MY_SECRET | openconnect.exe --passwd-on-stdin" does not work. Hence, any 
way to do this directly from a batch file or from Perl failed miserably. 
Again, why not a simple "--password MY_SECRET"? Frankly, it does not seem 
less secure than "echo MY_SECRET | openconnect.exe --passwd-on-stdin" 
except that the latter seems incredibly fragile on Windows 10....

Thanks!

p.


--
On Sun, 17 Sep 2023, Paolo Ienne (严保罗) wrote:

> Hello.
>
> First and foremost, a big thank you for the only way I found to connect 
> reliably to a Cisco VPN with a CLI (and without typing anything) on Windows. 
> I am still struggling to have VPN always on with Windows 10, ideally without 
> ever doing anything: I would love to switch on the laptop and VPN is there; 
> anything disconnects for any reason, the VPN comes back by itself as soon as 
> connectivity is restored. Honestly, I do not understand if I am dumb or why 
> this is not immediately possible. Any insight would be great, because I 
> suspect just about everyone would want that on a laptop (and I had it before 
> with a non-Cisco VPN).
>
> But I am writing to ask if it is correct that the Windows port of OpenConnect 
> does not offer the "--background" switch. It seems so (I finally managed to 
> access the latest build for Windows 10, thinking that the slighter older one 
> did not have it yet but newer might) but I find this mentioned nowhere.
>
> Last but not least, you may want to note that the links to "master branch for 
> 32-bit Windows or for 64-bit Windows" on
>
>   https://www.infradead.org/openconnect/packages.html
>
> are broken. The "Fedora dwmw2/openconnect COPR" mentioned in the next 
> paragraph actually work--although it was a bit of an adventure to manage to 
> unpack the multiple layers of archives and compressions to finally get to the 
> single meaningful file inside the RPM.
>
> Best,
>
> p.
>