Monday, March 3, 2008

Cisco VPN Client disconnects immediately after VPN session is established while using Huawei E220 modem with OSX

I had quite a bit of trouble getting the Cisco VPN Client working well while connected to the internet on my macbook (OS X 10.5.2) using the Huawei E220 HSDPS/UMTS/GPRS/EDGE modem. The problem is that Huawei supplied quite an erroneous script for OS X (the script is bundled from the huawei-supplied software from www.huawei.com). 

My problem exactly:

1. Connect to the net using the Huawei E220 Successfully.
2. Start the VPN Client, connect, session is properly established.
3 After 2 seconds, the VPN session disconnects.

I did not dig very deep to find out what the problem is (as i have no more hacking time these days) but i decided to use another modem script from Ross Barkman's collection ( http://www.taniwha.org.uk/ ). The script is the "Generic HSDPA" type. 

Download and unzip the script to ~/Library/Modem Scripts/ then in the network preferences, replace the "Huawei Mobile" with "generic HSDPA modem", then in the phone number, replace whatever you have there with the APN for your service provider. This is all, and you are ready to happily and securely work remotely using the Cisco VPN Client.