Cisco AnyConnect Client and the "Unable to process response from..." Error Message

If you get an error message saying: “Unable to process response from…” with the Cisco AnyConnect VPN client on Ubuntu, then the underlying problem is that the client is attempting to use the https_proxy environment variable to resolve the HTTP/S proxy to use. Not sure why exactly this causes a problem but the way to workaround this problem is to unset the https_proxy variable just for the process launching the VPN client. For example I’ve added a script named: vpnui to my ~/bin with the following contents:

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 #!/bin/sh 
 unset https_proxy 
 /opt/cisco/vpn/bin/vpnui

Then I changed the Applications|Internet|Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client menu shortcut to point to this script instead, and voila, problem solved.

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