Just as I had finished complaining about Cisco’s VPN drivers causing crashes, I stumbled across a macosxhints.com hint about vpnc.
Looks like this is well worth the effort to install and try it out. This will let me get that Cisco code out of my kernel and perhaps make the lock-ups go away.
Further instructions are available at the original poster’s site.
I’ll update this post with my experiences.
Hope it works out.. and that you detail any gotchas here to save the rest of us time later.
You might also check out shimo (http://www.nexumoja.org/projects/Shimo/), which puts a nice GUI front-end on vpnc, and adds growl support.
So this has been mostly working, but the routes are not set correctly. I have had to add my own post-connect script to fix the routes. I’m not sure this is a problem with vpnc, or potentially a problem with the configuration of the VPN that I’m connecting to.
Of course this is completely uneccessary if you have upgraded to Snow Leopard. SL now has built-in support for CiscoVPN clients. The one drawback that I can see is that the Apple native implementation respects the server-side ‘do not cache password’ flag.
An annoyance, but it still works.