Distributing the Cisco VPN client

elipschutz · ‎07-16-2003

I’ve gathered the following information from Cisco documentation.

The “VPN Client User Guide for Windows” says that “Cisco does not allow you to install the VPN Client software from a network drive”.

The “VPN Client Administrators Guide” says “Do not modify the [Cisco VPN Client] MSI file. To customize MSI, use a transform. Failure to follow recommended procedure will limit the level of support you can expect to Cisco.”

So far I’ve been unable to find a Cisco recommendation for distribution that suits our needs.

My question is whether or not to use IntelliMirror to distribute the VPN Client.

Thanks

gfullage · ‎07-16-2003

You can preconfigure everything in the VPN client, then just distribute it out to all your users, or have them grab it from a URL or FTP server somehow, there's multitudes of ways to do it and really you have to decide what suits your environment best. Definately don't have them load it from a network drive though, doesn't work.

To preconfigure it, follow this:

http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/vpn/client/rel4_0/admin_gd/vcach2.htm

and there's a bit more here:

http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/vpn/client/rel4_0/admin_gd/vcach5.htm

elipschutz · ‎07-17-2003

Thanks.

Regarding installing the software from the network, it does work (as long as we use the installshield version). Using Active Directory/Group Policy to assign the application to computers works as well, as long as we do not use transform files (and instead modify the VPN client .msi file).

Is it Cisco recommendation to provide means only to download the software and then have clients executing the installation locally?

Thanks again,

Best Regards

Emanuel Lipschütz