Doesn't have quite the same ring to it as first post, but blah, whatever. With the upgrade to Ubuntu Feisty came a new version of vpnc, the Cisco VPN client. It added lots of new features, including RFC3706 Dead Peer Detection. Unfortunately, this feature was broken for some clients, myself included. Some kind soul beat me to it and filed a bug, but I had a look and proposed a patch. Someone on an upstream mailing list proposed a better patch, so I applied that to my local version and, to cut a long story short, submitted it. It has so far been accepted into feisty-proposed, which should mean that it will make its way into Feisty fairly soon, once it's been tested, and lots of people will again be able to connect reliably to their Cisco VPNs.