Two VPN's clients installed at once?

July 21, 2006 12:02 PM

How can I install both Watchguard and Cisco VPN clients on my PC?

My company was bought by another company, all of our VPN stuff was done with cisco, the other company is using watchguard. As I am currently the only person who wears to hats and needs to access both networks regularly, they aren't going to make any changes yet.

Unfortunately, if I install the watchguard VPN, Cisco stops working and vice versa. Is there a way to get both of these installed simultaneously? I don't need to be connected to both VPNs at the same time, I just don't want to have to uninstall one and install the other evertime i want to switch.

posted by empath to computers & internet (3 comments total)

I've never had luck with this -- and we're talking on both PCs and Macs. Most of the proprietary VPN clients seem to do everything they can to be incompatible with each other; it drives me pretty crazy. The only time I've felt that I came up with a workable solution was by maxing out my PC desktop's memory, and then using VMWare to create a virtual machine running Windows XP. Then, I installed one VPN client on the primary install, and the other on the virtual install -- it worked well, given that I (like you) didn't ever have to be connected to both VPNs at once.

The only other solution I can think of is to use one of the more basic VPN clients and ask for both VPNs to be set up so that they're compatible with that client. For example, you can set up almost any Cisco VPN server such that it will allow connection and authentication by the Windows built-in VPN client; I don't know anything about Watchguard, but that's a possibility there as well, and then you have one client that connects to either.
posted by delfuego at 12:25 PM on July 21, 2006

XP also has IPsec built in, which will likely be more secure than PPTP.

If the two networks are not yet jointly managed, make sure to be careful not to connect to both simultaneously.

Bad Things can happen.
posted by baylink at 12:54 PM on July 21, 2006

I do this today (Nortel VPN and Windows extranet) and the answer for me is VMWare. Create two VMs, install a Win2k (unless you have several XP licenses) in each one, then install one set of VPN software into each VM.

Create a directory in your host system that you share with both the VMs (they'll probably be able to access it even if you have the VPN software running - works with Nortel at least).

The only issue with this solution is that you may have to install duplicate copies of all your software, which sucks. But that's what the shared folder is for.
posted by lowlife at 10:51 AM on July 24, 2006