My office is protected by a SonicWALL firewall device, necessitating the use of their NetExtender client app for SSL-based VPN connectivity. Unfortunately, the introduction of Mac OS X 10.9 wreaked havoc with that app’s functionality.
SonicWALL isn’t exactly doing a great job of keeping their utility apps up-to-date and NetExtender is a perfect example. The current “general release,” v7.0.741 (released in Feb. 2013) is unable to retain a reliable connection (it drops after only just a few minutes) and the currently available “early release,” v7.5.216 (released in April of this year), while it fixes this issue, BREAKS the ability to create a proper tunneling connection.
Quick sidebar:
“Tunneling,” for those who may not know, is a VPN connection where ALL traffic goes through the host firewall and out its Internet connection, thereby making it appear as if the remote client is actually within the host network. By default, mot VPN connections only send traffic destined for the host network through the VPN connection; all other traffic is sent via the client’s normal Internet connection.
While this doesn’t really matter if your clients are only using VPN to access internal resources, it IS a problem if they’re doing testing against external servers that are only permitting traffic from our office’s external IP address!
Fortunately, a protracted call with SonicWALL technical support procured an in-house version of NetExtender, v7.5.765, that solves the problem. Considering how slow they tend to be about releasing updates, I thought I’d offer it up for those in a similar bind.
Download NetExtender v7.5.765 here.
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