Urania

When I first came to Minnesota State University Moorhead, I was irritated by the fact that their wireless network didn’t use some authentication scheme. Instead it is open, but useless unless you log in via a Cisco VPN client. This was irritating to me because the Cisco VPN server (at least the setup for MSUM) was not compatible with the built-in VPN clients in MacOS X. As such you had to use Cisco’s incredibly poorly designed client. It worked, but everytime I wanted to connect, I had to launch the Cisco VPN application, then log in. The password was not remembered in Apple’s Keychain, which was just un-Mac-like.

Lo and behold, a few week’s after getting here, I discovered the (then) newly introduced Cisco VPN frontend for the Mac, Shimo. Shimo is awesome. It lives in the Menubar and all I every had to do to log in to the campus VPN network is go to the Shimo menu and click “Connect”. Done. This has actually come in very useful when I am away from campus since access to the VPN network allows me to connect to any MSUM server as if I was local, so I have been able to send outbound mail from Arizona, run IDL (using the campus license server) from Minneapolis, and so on.

Setting up Shimo for use here is fairly simple.

2. First go to the MSUM Cisco VPN client download page. Download and install the appropriate client for MacOS Cisco VPN client software.
3. Download and install Shimo.
4. Launch Shimo (it’s in the /Applications directory). It’ll appear on your menubar as a “doorway” icon. Click on it and select “Preferences…”.
   
5. In the General Preferences tab, I just set up Shimo to launch on startup, to disconnect the VPN on quit, and to show how long I have been connected on the menubar.
   
6. I then when to the Profiles tab and clicked on the [+] button near the bottom of the pane to add a profile.
   
7. When the Profiles sheet appears, I just set up a “msumvpn” profilename in the General tab:
   
8. Under the Authentication tab, I had to set my username and password (blurred out here), and here’s the tricky bit, at MSUM, the Authentication method is “Group”, so you have to know the Group name and password, which (as revealed on the Linux VPN Configuration Instructions page for MSUM) are “wireless” and “dragon-wireless” respectively. With those four pieces of information, the MSUM VPN account was setup. I clicked “OK” to accept. The passwords are stored securely in Apple’s Keychain, so I never have to worry about them again.
   
9. Under the Connection tab, I had to tell Shimo the address of my server (”msumvpn.mnstate.edu”) and the VPN protocol (IPSec over UDP).
10. Now all I do is go to my menubar and select “Connect” and I am connected to the VPN.
    

Now, with a nice, simple, mac interface, the only issue I have with the MSUM VPN server is that it disconnects you from the VPN after about 60 minutes. If this bothers you, you can set up Shimo to automatically reconnect if the connection is dropped and/or to automatically connect if it sees the “msum-wireless” wireless network. Its all under the Profile “Advanced” settings.