Bitten by 64bit: Cisco, help a brother out?

A few weeks ago,  my home PC suffered a massive power issue, and refuses to stay booted up for more than a few seconds.   Of course this was a good excuse to finally go out and spec out a new home PC, since ours was getting long in the tooth.

Well,  the new PC is fast, and I decided to install Vista64 instead of Vista32, since it’s about time to make that transition.  My wife’s design applications all come in 64-bit flavors, so there would be a benefit for doing so.

So far so good, with one glaring exception:  Cisco VPN client. (5.0.0.340)

The IPsec and WebVPN clients refuse to work on Vista64, which as left me out in the VPN cold.  It seems  that Cisco is not going to be supporting IPsec on 64bit OS’s, and will be transitioning 64bit support for their Any connect SSL client.   Unfortunately this client is still in Beta, and testing with it so far still has some bugs to deal with.

So there is hope in sight, but for now I am forced to either run Cisco VPN in a VM on my desktop PC, or use an old laptop.

It’s the price you sometimes pay for being cutting edge it seems.

UPDATE (06-28-07):  Cisco has released their AnyConnect firmware, and client.  This now works perfectly on Vista 64-Bit!  Oh Happy Day!

From what I understand only the Anyconnect SSL VPN will support x64 machines in the future, but I could be wrong.

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