My office at the George Washington University got four copies of Apple OS 10.6 today, and after work I upgraded my MacBook Pro from 10.5 Leopard to 10.6 Snow Leopard. I repaired my disk permissions, made a Time Machine backup, and booted from CD to perform the upgrade. Snow Leopard is fine so far, except that when I tried to connect to GWU’s campus wireless network (gwireless) using the Juniper VPN client (Network Connect.app), I received the error: “Network Connect cannot establish a secure session. Network Connect cannot start the tunneling service.” This occurred both when I launched Network Connect from within Safari and launched Network Connect on its own.
My friend Google led me to a quick Terminal command that will restore functionality to Network Connect and allow me to access the gwireless campus network. How to use Network Connect in Snow Leopard in Five Easy Steps:
- Open Network Connect and check the version number by mousing to “Network Connect > About Network Connect.” It will probably be 6.2, 6.3, or 6.4. Mine was 6.3. Quit Network Connect.
- Open Terminal and type “sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/juniper/nc/6.3.0/” where “6.3.0″ is your Network Connect version number. Press Enter after typing this first command and you will get the following warning before it executes:
“WARNING: Improper use of the sudo command could lead to data lossor the deletion of important system files. Please double-check your typing when using sudo. Type “man sudo” for more information. To proceed, enter your password, or type Ctrl-C to abort.” - Enter your password and press Enter. You will not see a confirmation; you will only see additional text if the command did not execute properly.
- Next, type “sudo mkdir ‘/Applications/Network Connect.app/Contents/Frameworks’” and press Enter. Again, you will not see a confirmation or any additional text unless the command was incorrect.
- Quit Terminal and open Network Connect again. You should now be able to connect to the wireless network.
Although I successfully connected to the wireless network after this hack, surfing the internet in both Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4 has been spotty. I have full signal strength, but it sometimes takes me multiple attempts to load a page. Eventually the page always loads, but simple browsing through the vpn is annoying. This problem might just be because I’m using a dorm wireless network that I’ve never used before, but I’m inclined to think that Snow Leopard and/or Network Connect are part of the problem.
Further notes:
As of now, this problem with Network Connect has not been added to the unofficial Snow Leopard Compatibility Chart at wikidot or in Apple’s official help document. Credit for this hack goes to jehan over at The Vagary. According to his source, Network Connect fails under Snow Leopard because the upgrade changes permissions for the 6.2.0 (and above) directory so that it is no longer writable, and because Network Connect fails if the Frameworks directory does not exist in its app bundle.
Update (5 September 2009):
The Cisco VPN Client has now been updated to work with 10.6 Snow Leopard. Instead of going to vpn.gwu.edu to connect to GWireless, download the Cisco VPN Client from the ISS Help Desk (GW username and password required). The Cisco Client is faster to connect to GWireless and will not boot you off the network after a certain amount of time. However, it is not browser-based and must be installed to work.
Calder, you help me a lot on this. Thank you very much, it work almost perfectly except that I forgot to add ” ” to the command to get through “Network Connect.app”.
If you don’t mind I have published your post with all credits in my blog.
Thanks,
Thanks so much! I am a student at GW and this made me (with no previous experience with terminal) able to once again access the internet. Your step by step instructions were great.
I had the same issues with starting the tunneling service. Once I got the juniper/nc/6.3.0 chmod’d I was still getting errors:
2009-09-09 17:23:16.524 ncproxyd[19016] ncproxyd.info ncproxyd exiting status 1 (ncproxyd.cpp:92)
2009-09-09 17:24:34.370 ncproxyd[19054] ncproxyd.error Failed to gain root privileges: Operation not permitted
I ended up having to do:
chmod 4711 /usr/local/juniper/nc/6.3.0/ncproxyd
I think that ncproxyd needs to run as root to update your Mac’s routing table.
DUDE,
You are the best!!! We are not computer gurus, but your site told us exactly what to do. THANKS A TON!!!
We put the above into Terminal and Network connect 6.3.0 works like a charm in Snow Leopard.
Thanks again.
Ron and Cindy McGaugh
This was awesome…i have 6.4 and now i can connect….Many Thanks
Raghu
AWESOME!!!!!!! thanks so much!
Thank you, thank you, thank you! This helped a ton.
I have the Network Connect.app in my application folder, but i do not have the /usr/local/juniper/nc/6.3.0/ folder so I can not run the sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/juniper/nc/6.3.0/ command?
Is there an install i need to run first?
You shouldn’t have to do anything beside the steps above if you already have Network Connect installed. No other installs required.
Are you in the administrator account and/or the account that originally installed Network Connect? This might cause you to not find the folder. Simplest solution might be to uninstall and then reinstall Network Connect.
Calder,
CISCO in Germany doesn`t know anything about an update of the CISCO VPN client. Could you publish the version number of the updated version to work with OS X 10.6.
Thanks Wilhelm
The VPN Client I’m running successfully on Snow Leopard is Version 4.9.01.0180. I’m not sure what my old version was or if this update actually came form CISCO (versus being tweaked by someone at GW).
hi,
I tried you solution but after step 4 terminal says
mkdir: ‘/Applications: No such file or directory
mkdir: Connect.app/Contents: No such file or directory
Can you please explain what I am missing (I am very new to the imac world)
try including the single quotes around the command, ie ’sudo mkdir /Applications….’
The reason why your getting problems is because of the space between “Network” and “Connect.app”
Alternatively you can use %20 instead of the space, or you can use “\ ” (note the space).
Personally I’m still having trouble getting the darn thing to start the tunnelling service. I’d rather not give root access to ncproxyd
I’m running 6.5. I’d rather run 6.1 (the version they have at work) for assured compatibility, but I can’t uninstall version 6.5 completely.
thanks for this =) works like a charm
Worked like a charm! Thanks muchly for the easy steps.
Awesome, super easy. Thanks a ton
Thank you very much, it work perfectly
and the command to add the Framework dir was a great thing
You saved my job
Thanks,
Great tip – thanks!
I followed the steps given, but when I connect to the host site, it tells me to upgrade my version of Network Connect, and in doing that I’m told it has problems extracting one of the components, which also then deletes any version of Network Connect I had installed.
I have deep stretch marks will this help to vanish them?
It works!! Thx!!!! Thank u so much!!
It’s nice to check out websites with material and thanks a lot for the share which you’ve got given. Normally, I’m pretty amazed, but etc…