I’m working on a Java web application that parses the data generated by the into a series of scientific parameters and estimations (array orientation, resolution, etc.) that can help scientists find already made observations that might be useful for their science.
Because I’m based in Garching bei München, and this facility is in the Atacama Dessert, the application needs to live in their chilean offices, and thus a VPN connection is needed in order to be part of their network.
They use the Cisco AnyConnect VPN client, and I was having a hard time making it work with my Mac. In particular, I was being able to login to the remote system, but at the time the VPN interface was going to be enabled, it failed with the error “AnyConnect was not able to establish a connection to the specified secure gateway”.
Digging in Console.app it showed that the vpnagent and vpnui processes were not able to use the network interface utun0, and I was getting disconnected. Googling with those keywords did not turn up anything useful.
I was suspecting something was wrong with the software, because of its inability to use utun0, so I decided to try a different VPN software client that could use the AnyConnect setup XML file, and chose Shimo.
To my surprise (and relief, and satisfaction), when I started Shimo, it complained that it could not establish the VPN connection because Back to my Mac was enabled! Sure enough, I disabled Back to my Mac, and was able to connect using Shimo… and then again using Cisco AnyConnect.
Now that I know this, googling for Cisco VPN AnyConnect Back to My Mac shows that they are indeed incompatible, but it seems there was no result linking the error message I was getting, hence this entry, so that in case you find yourself with the same problem, you can find a relevant result!