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How to run Cisco VPN over EVDO when you've got VMWare Fusion installed

Well I finally got one of those EVDO cards, specifically a Novatel Wireless Merlin EX720 that fits nicely in the Express Card slot of my MacBook Pro. It works great pretty much everywhere I go, but there's one thing that's bugged me: the Cisco VPN would drop when I was on EVDO, just a few seconds after I connected.

At first, I fixed it by upgrading to a newer version of the Cisco VPN client. That fixed some issues with Parallels. All was good until I also installed VMWare Fusion. (Note that this is all on Mac OS X 10.4.10.) But today I figured out what you need to do (thanks to Michael Renner for the tip in the VMWare Community):

Cisco VPN logo

  1. Download the latest Cisco VPN client. As of this writing, the best available is 4.9.01.0080. Fortunately, MacUpdate is hosting downloads of Cisco VPN 4.9.01.0080.

  2. Go into Terminal and run:

sudo /Library/Application\\ Support/VMware\\ Fusion/boot.sh --stop

This has the side-effect of disabling VMWare Fusion. I think what's happening is a conflict in the kernel extensions.

  1. Start up Cisco VPN, connect and enjoy.

  2. Either immediately after or later when you need VMWare Fusion, you can go back and run

sudo /Library/Application\\ Support/VMware\\ Fusion/boot.sh --start
to re-enable it.

(Updated 3/10/2008: Ensured that the backslashes in the shell commands are available to be copied from your browser - they were getting stripped out by the blog.)