New Router Excitement, old Cisco VPN Client Blues

Yes, my old router died the other day - what a pain in the proverbials that was too. The dead router was a battered old Belkin (I admit to slight embarrassment at owning anything ‘Belkin’) - nevertheless it had done me many years of unending service without complaint. Many things annoyed me about the beast of Belkin though… crap logging, the occasional spate of falling out of love with the Internet connection and the occasional freak out during mammoth torrent sessions.

Typically, the death of the beast of Belkin, and hence loss of Internet coincided with my needing to get an assignment finished, VPN into my work place and also get on to ebay to look for a couple of Xmas presents (cheapskate!). All this to say that I was forced to purchase something locally in a great hurry - so I ended up with a Linksys WAG45GS. I had heard some good reports about these and a few bad ones too, mainly pertaining to some difficulties with VPN access etc.

So far I am pretty pleased with it - did not take long to set up out of the box, and once I got Karoo’s connection settings sorted, was on the net. And then came the setting up of Cisco’s VPN client… To be honest I first thought that I would be screwed - no response from the remote client. I googled about for a bit, checked to see that VPN passthru was enabled (it is by default). Nothing. You’d probably find that the forums turn up very little useful information about this, which is why it put it here…

On the Cisco VPN client, check the properties of your connection and check under the ‘Transport’ tab (second one from the left in my client version - 5.0.01.060) . See that ‘Enable Transparent Tunneling’ is checked on, with IPSec over TCP checked also. Worked a treat for me.