Cisco VPN client prevents Cisco' wireless card from acquiring IP address

[ctinajero]

Hello there,

Some VPN users complain that Cisco's VPN client (3.6.x) prevent Cisco's Aironet wireless cards from acquiring IP configuration after a VPN tunnel is established. Here is the scenario:

-At home: the user connects to wireless network , establishes a VPN tunnel, closes thinkpad's lid to put the machine into standby/hibernate mode.

-At work: the user brings the machine back from standy/hibernate mode by opening the lid and/or by pressing FN+FN4/F12. Then, the uers goes to a command prompt and issues ipconfig. The result shows an auto-configured(APIPA) IP address (i.e.169.*.*.*). At this point, the user issues ipconfig /release and then /renew. Still, the wireless card does not acquire valid IP configuration. Finally, the user has to remove the card and/or sometimes reboot the machine, so the card can get an IP address. It seesm that the VPN client keeps the tunnel available all the time. Therefore, my question is: Does the VPN client should keep the tunnel available even after the machine has been on standby and/or hibernate mode? Is the client working as designed? Is there a way to force the client to drop the tunnel as soon as the machine goes into standby and/or hibernate?

Any ideas and/or solutions to this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Carlos T. CCNA

IBM Toronto Lab Software

[gfullage]

The tunnel should drop out automatically soon after the laptop goes into standby cause the NIC shuts down at this time also, and the keepalives from the concentrator won't be returned. Make sure you have IKE keepalives enabled in the concentrator group that these users are connecting into (under the IPSec tab in the group), otherwise the tunnel may stay up indefinately.