a bit of tech and design

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Windows 7 x64 Cisco VPN

October 26th, 2009

[UPDATE 2010-04-25: Cisco released a 64 bit version of their client - you can download it off their site. I have not tried it, so can't speak to whether it works or not]

The Cisco VPN client does NOT support 64 bit Windows. They have officially announced they will not be releasing a 64 bit version of their client and people wishing to use Cisco VPN on 64 bit Windows should upgrade to something called AnyConnect which, as I understand it, requires a hardware/software upgrade at the VPN gateway end. No-go for a single person wanting to switch to x64.

An hour of Googling the topic later, this is my discovery: you’re screwed.

The options are:

While the Shrew Soft client is a well known alternative (judging by the number of blog/forum posts mentioning it), it’s a pain to set up if you don’t have a .pcf profile for your VPN connection… After losing a good hour to find and set it up (and writing the first version of this post), I got a tip from Dinko Korunic to try vpnc… and it worked like a charm.

The configuration is dead simple – gateway, group name and password, username and password and you’re off…

I haven’t actually tested Shrew or vpnc enough to talk about how good/fast/stable they are, but as far as setup goes, vpnc wins.

6 Comments

  • Rob December 11th, 2009 at 19:24

    VPNC works well but does not allow for configuration where you do not have XAUTH setup. So if your configuration is setup just to requre a Group Name and Password but NOT Username and Password then it will not work.

    Reply
  • Jeff December 24th, 2009 at 01:17

    Just tried the newest Shrew release dated December 09 and it works great with Windows 7 x64 for Cisco VPN as long as you can import the .pcf file. No other configuration necessary.

    Reply
  • RobX January 16th, 2010 at 18:41

    I installed VPNC (Win7 x64) and my Cisco VPN shows me connected, but I’m unable to even ping a machine. A colleague has the same configuration, but on Vista; it works fine for him. Does anyone have any ideas as to why I might have a problem? Thanks.

    Reply
  • Exodus January 29th, 2010 at 14:19

    ROBX,

    I’m having the same probleme. Did you fixed it?

    Att.

    Reply
  • allixsenos January 29th, 2010 at 14:25

    I think I’m having the same problem :(

    does anyone have a solution? ^^

    Reply
    • zajc March 4th, 2010 at 20:26

      Try to choose Force-NATT. It works for me.

      Reply

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