Problem solved
Posted on April 24, 2008 by Chris
This post has absolutely nothing to do with Internet strategy but this issue has caused me so much grief in the last 18 months I want to make sure anyone else out there who runs into it can try this solution.
When I’m on the road I carry a MacBook Pro running Leopard and Windows XP via Parallels and I use a Verizon EVDO card for network access. After years of being a road warrior and using laptops from pretty much every manufacturer (they pretty much all sucked except for a ThinkPad T42 which was acceptable) I can safely say this is the best setup I’ve every had. It is light, powerful and I can run all my favorite Mac and Windows programs pretty much seamlessly. Plus I get to use Final Cut Express HD to edit video when I’m on vacation.
I use a Cisco 1811 router on my home network which gives me access to everything I need remotely via the tried and true Cisco VPN client. I like the Cisco gear as very few (none?) of the other router manufacturers that have price points for a small office or home network properly support the Mac OS.
My issue has been that no matter what I tried, I could never get the Cisco Mac VPN client to connect to the router. The Cisco Windows VPN client always worked from within Parallels but not on the Mac side of the computer. It drove me nuts and Cisco engineering support could never figure it out. They ultimately just said they don’t support any Macs that are also running Parallels (very lame) and tossed it back in my lap.
The developers over at Parallels support finally gave me the missing pieces of information today and I am now back in VPN connectivity heaven. So here is what I did to fix the situation:
1. Uninstall Parallels (you’ll get your VM back so this is pretty safe but backup everything just in case). I downloaded the latest build and used the uninstaller that comes as part of the disk image. Just dragging it to the trash doesn’t work.
2. Uninstall the Mac Cisco VPN client if you’ve got it on your machine. Use sudo /usr/local/bin/vpn_uninstall in Terminal to do it. Again, dragging it to the trash doesn’t work.
3. Reboot
4. Reinstall the Mac Cisco VPN client
5. Execute the following commands in Terminal:
sudo /sbin/ipfw flush
sudo /sbin/ipfw disable firewall
6. Try to connect. It should work at this point.
7. Reinstall Parallels
8. Go to System Preferences / Security and re-enable your firewall. I use the option to control access and permit the VPN client access to the Network.
There is another good post on this issue on Chris Barber’s blog but I could never get his solution to work as the Verizon EVDO client changes the network configuration on the machine somehow and things didn’t match up.
Incidentally, if you’ve recently upgraded to version 4 of the Verizon EVDO Access Manager and it stopped Parallels from connecting to the network via shared networking, you need to uninstall and reinstall Parallels to fix it. The Verizon Access Manager install hammers the Parallels settings somehow and kills the Parallels NAT drivers. Don’t call Verizon support…they are clueless on this issue (I tried). Even Parallels support doesn’t seem to know about it yet.
I love my Mac but Apple has got to work on their networking support layer. Every issue I’ve had with Leopard has been a result of it not playing nice with either Parallels, EVDO or Cisco. It is just way to complex…even when you know what you are doing.
UPDATE:
Some further testing has determined that the firewall disable command isn’t required. It is the flush that solves the problem. I’ve also figured out that if you are using the current version of the VPN client (4.9.0.1.0100) over an EVDO connection it will drop after 5 seconds if wifi is enabled. If wifi is not enabled it will work. According to Cisco, they have fixed this issue in the next release of the client.
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