Cisco VPN Client Error 51 After Leopard 10.5.3 Upgrade

June 26th, 2008 · 2 Comments

JHU uses Cisco VPN for outside connections to the university network. Unfortunately, this requires using Cisco’s VPN client, which is not really available for free download on the internet at large. Normally when I have a problem, I just re-install it, but the current version provided by Hopkins refuses to install on 10.5.3, citing a wrong O.S. version number. “Must be 10.4 or greater.” So 10.5 !>= 10.4? Anyway, what’s the problem I was trying to fix?

After upgrading my workstation from 10.5.2 to 10.5.3, the VPN client refused to load with a message about “Client error 51″, saying it couldn’t find the VPN service. This may be related to my use of an external USB wifi adapter, but it was never a problem in 10.5.2. Regardless, I found that restarting the VPN service fixed the problem. As an administrative user, I had to run this:

sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart

Now everything works fine.

Tags: Mac OS X · Tech

2 responses so far ↓

1 Nito // Jun 27, 2008 at 08:18

Thanks for hat! I had that exact same problem.
2 brock // Jun 27, 2008 at 08:39

Nito: I figured I’d post it to save someone else the headache. Glad it helped!
3 losimo // Jul 21, 2008 at 11:50

Thanks!!! :O
4 Justin // Aug 7, 2008 at 08:06

I’m getting this error when attempting to open the cisco vpn client but that sudo command only works if the client is in startup and even so it only restarts the application.
5 brock // Aug 7, 2008 at 08:08

Justin: That sucks, I only had to do it once, and it’s worked ever since, even through multiple reboots. I have to say I was surprised at that myself, but whatever the problem is seems to have been resolved.