At work today one of our guys had to connect to a client via some Cisco VPN.
He runs Linux. Mandrake I think. Another one of our guys runs Debian, and another Ubuntu.
Today it took the Mandrake user (who knows what he is doing as a programmer and can get around *nix pretty well) only 5 hours to get VPN working. I think the Debian and Ubuntu users it took between 2-4 hours to connect to the VPN.
Want to know what the solution was for connecting to the VPN running Mandrake? Running a Windows XP virtual machine and connecting to the VPN.
It should be noted that our machines running Leopard took about 2 seconds to connect to the same VPN with no configuration problems. Even though KDE has a “really cool tool for connecting to VPNs” it really was pretty worthless in the end.
Honestly, I should have gotten up in the morning and gone to the Apple store and bought him a Mac Mini or Macbook. It would have likely saved us time and money.
+1 Apple, +1 Microsoft, -1 Linux.
Someone is going to surely come on here and say, “Oh it’s easy you just do X and X and recompile X”, but lets really just say it wasn’t working. I don’t have the details, I just know that with all of the people here we couldn’t get it working easily. I hate Windows, but I sadly must say that it actually did its job here.
