Colorado State University

This post is marked as Deprecated and therefore contains outdated information.

UPDATE: The information regarding the Cisco VPN in this article is deprecated as the Cisco IPSec VPN client has reached its end of life .  Please use the Secure Gateway instead: https://gateway.colostate.edu.

It has been stated before and will be stated again, but here goes – Cisco will not be releasing a VPN client for Windows 64 bit computers.  This leaves those running 64 bit windows in a bit of a bind when they need to access resources that are restricted to on-campus users.  VPN allows those who are traveling and working from home to act like they are using a computer that is physically on campus, allowing their computer to access restricted resources.  A few of these resources are Library journals, network drives, and Pangea (for the Department of Biology).  The Pangea connection application will not work unless you are on campus, or using a VPN client from off campus.

Fortunately, there is now a solution!  The Juniper Network SSL gateway that ACNS has set up has a (currently) unpublished feature called NetConnect.  NetConnect will allow a full tunnel to be created through the SSL gateway.  The way you access this unpublished feature is to append ‘netconnect’ after the SSL URL which creates the following:

https://secure.colostate.edu/netconnect

You will log in as usual with your CSU eID but will now notice a new section at the bottom of the page called ‘NetConnect’.  You will also see a ‘Start’ button on the right side of this section.  Clicking on this will create the secure tunnel onto campus, allowing you to run the Pangea connection application!  Of course, the first time you run this option you will need to install the Juniper NetConnect client – this only takes a few minutes though.

Enjoy!