N900 questions (Cisco VPN? SSH?)
 

Hi all,

My purchasing of the N900 relies heavily on whether or not I can use it for work.

My job is a classic on-call 24/7 IT job where I babysit over 800 stores, weblogic environments, webmethods environments, LDAP, blah blah. Needless to say, I always have to keep my work laptop near me whenever I go anywhere and I despise it.

My big question is will the N900 (Or Maemo I suppose) have a Cisco VPN client as I need it to connect to my corporate network?

At one point there was a Cisco VPN client that existed which I used on my N800 and it worked great, I could even import the .pcf file from my work and link right up. However, due to the 800's lack of permanent connectivity I have fallen out of the "scene" for tablet technology.

Regards

Re: N900 questions (Cisco VPN? SSH?)
 

Provided vpnc is ported to Maemo5 you should be fine.

I use it on Fedora11 to connect to my corporate Cisco VPN.

Re: N900 questions (Cisco VPN? SSH?)
 

If VPNC is available on Fremantle, VPN connections to Cisco concentrators should be OK. I don't see any technical reason of why it could not be ported on the new OS.

Maybe OpenConnect (a clone of Cisco's AnyConnect) could also be ported on Fremantle....

edit: I'm slow at posting :(

Re: N900 questions (Cisco VPN? SSH?)
 

While I can't speak to the Cisco VPN client....per the thread title the N900 will definitely have SSH and thus rudimentary vpn capabilities via tunneling if all else fails.

Re: N900 questions (Cisco VPN? SSH?)
 

SSH works great on the N900, as does scp. There's even a good sshfs, too. Cannot comment on VPNC, sorry.

Re: N900 questions (Cisco VPN? SSH?)
 

Thanks for the replies so far.

Does anyone know if the N900 will hand WPA-Enterprise?

The N800 never was able to connect.

Re: N900 questions (Cisco VPN? SSH?)
 

According to a review on my-symbian of a test unit (so, with firmware not in its final version), the following WPA features were supported:

WPA-PSK
PA-EAP, with PEAP, TLS, TTLS (EAP GTC, EAP MSCHAPv2, MSCHAPv2) protocols...

final protocols and feature are not known yet...

Re: N900 questions (Cisco VPN? SSH?)
 

People who require Cisco VPN usually have no other choice than a Cisco-compatible VPN client hence vpnc or vpnc-gui. Sometimes, GUI doesn't cut it. There isn't a vpnc/vpnc-gui port for Fremantle (yet).

SSH and VPN both serve different purpose.

With SSH you can set up a VPN too. Here is a howto. Keep in mind the howto might not be optimized for Maemo 5 as it is a Ubuntu howto.

Other options are OpenVPN and IPsec.

IPsec is complex, and advanced, but most supported ie. neither iPhone nor S60 support OpenVPN. For those who are about to set up a VPN infrastructure I highly recommend to take a look at OpenVPN because its open source, portable, and relatively easy to set up.

Another easy way to set up a temporary VPN is Hamachi, but the Maemo client is not developed anymore.

Re: N900 questions (Cisco VPN? SSH?)
 

If by "WPA Enterprise" you mean EAP-TTLS+PAP, then no, this bug is still open.

Re: N900 questions (Cisco VPN? SSH?)
 

completely agree with the OpenVPN stuff. I'll add to that in saying that OpenVPN also has the advantage of operating over standard TCP or UDP, and thus doesn't require the hackery at the router level (or extra encapsulation which further bloats the datastream) to pass through NATs and such like IPSec does thus making OpenVPN a far more universally usable tool (in addition to quite a few other cools things you can do with it that deserves a separate thread).