Saturday, August 11, 2012

Windows 8 and The Unsupported Cisco VPN Client

When you spend most of your time doing remote sessions into client environments using the Cisco VPN Client, I found it a bit troubling to find out that Cisco announced their VPN Client End of Life.  However, since I had the installation on a supported Windows 7 box, I was not too worried that Windows 8 would not be supported.  Fast forward to August 8, 2012: my laptop died, all I had was a Windows 8 tablet to use as my defunct work computer, and I was no longer able to get to my clients...
To resolve this issue:
1) Open up the Registry Editor:
\HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\vpnva\DisplayName

2) Edit the DisplayName, and clean out all of the junk (including the semi-colon) before the adapter name, leaving just the display name.  For example:
"@oem10.inf,%vpnva_Desc%;Cisco AnyConnect VPN Virtual Miniport Adapter for Windows x64"
becomes:
"Cisco AnyConnect VPN Virtual Miniport Adapter for Windows x64"