damians personal blog

my university provides means to access the intranet from outside or from wireless lan via a virtual private network. a client for os x has been developed as for windows and linux.

the installation is straight forward, and after a reboot the cisco vpn client lets you connect over a secure channel to the unifr network.

but sometimes the vpn client will not connect anymore, no matter what you do: restart the client, reconnect the wlan connection, logout and login. you had to restart the whole operating system just to get your f***ing vpn working again...

...up to now! because today, during distributed system classes, i had an enlightening idea: what about just restarting the vpn deamon? a quick
top -l 1 | grep -i "vpn" showed that the deamon cvpnd is also quit when exiting the vpn client. thus, there is no deamon permanently active. but what about a kernel extension? this was a more promising approach.
locate ".kext" | grep -i "vpn" showed me where to attack.

thus, the solution to the 'dead' vpn client is:


.....aaaand you can enjoy your wireless freedom again! ain't life great?!

update:
i forgot to mention that you should quit your vpn client, and maybe also desactivate your airport card while reloading the kernel extension. i did not yet have another outage, so i couldn't do any further testing.