This is one of those posts you do in the hope that it will save someone else from the pain you’ve gone through. If you don’t know what Checkpoint VPN-1 is, or SecureClient, don’t bother reading this.
But if you’ve got a Mac, and you need to get through to (and past) a Checkpoint VPN gateway, then here’s what finally worked for me, in brief:
- Download the most recent client (which is ancient anyway) from Checkpoint.
- If you already tried to install it, completely uninstall it.
- If you’re running Snow Leopard, then patch the installer and follow the other instructions on this page.
- If you use a hardware token (e.g. RSA SecurID) you’ve been having weird problems connecting to the gateway, consider trying a new hardware token (happened to me).
- Finally, make sure that your account is enabled by the admin, since a few failures seems to trigger a disabling of the account automatically.
At that point, my life began getting much better. Back at home, I have a Linksys WRT160N router, which seemed to have all the good VPN protcols already enabled for passthrough. But no luck connecting with SecureClient. So I found this very helpful tip, and followed the advice to force UDP encapsulation. And now I finally have working VPN from the office and from home.
Whew.
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