Cisco VPN Error 51 workaround

Cisco VPN Error 51 workaround

Macintosh OSX


Have you have ever encountered the following error when launching the Cisco VPN Client on your mac:

Error 51: Unable to communicate with the VPN subsystem.
Please make sure that you have at least one network interface that is currently active and has an IP address and start this application again.


The problem stems from another network interface (like firewire or a third party network interface such as VMware or Hamachi) stepping on the cisco VPN interface.


Over the years, I have worked around this problem in several ways... all of which are not as graceful as:


sudo SystemStarter restart CiscoVPN


Anyway, just wanted to save you reboots and or frustration should it ever come up for you...

You could even make an alias out of it by add the following line to your .bash_profile

alias resetcisco='sudo SystemStarter restart CiscoVPN'

then (on next login) you could just type "resetcisco".