everyone has a shangri-la to find: Lewis Thompson's weblog

This is a short entry for those other Sun employees who have 64-bit Windows machines at home who wish to be able to connect to SWAN via the VPN without resorting to running OpenSolaris or Linux inside a VM.

Cisco do not provide a 64-bit compatible VPN client for free.  However, a third party, Shrew Soft, do.  Shrew Access Manager can be downloaded from http://www.shrew.net/download/vpn - I can confirm that development build 2.1.5-rc4 definitely connects to SWAN on Windows 7 release.

The steps to configure this are very basic:

1. Download and install Shrew Access Manager (http://www.shrew.net/download/vpn)


2. Visit the Sun download library (https://downloadlibrary.central.sun.com/) and download vpn_client_profiles.tar.gz.  This file can be found by following the download trail for VPN 3000 and selecting Linux as the client


3. Extract the relevant pcf file for your GEO (in my case this is EMEA_UK.pcf)


4. From Shrew Access Manager select File->Import to import the relevant pcf file


5. Connect and enter your Sun VPN userid and provide a token generated with button 8 on the token card

It's also worth pointing out that I also have Punchin configured, so ITOps have a public certificate for me on file.

Good luck!

This month I am on a rotation into the Solaris RPE (Revenue Product Engineering) Kernel team where I have picked a bug in the Solaris kernel which I am attempting to diagnose and fix.  Thanks to Mita Solanky, Chris Beal, Bill Watson & Rob Harris for helping me arrange this.

Normally I work as a part of the TSC (Technical Solutions Centre) Kernel team as an engineer who diagnoses kernel-related issues.  This could be system panics (i.e. crash dump analysis), performance problems, errors, queries from customers, etc.  The RPE organisation is the direct escalation path for us engineers in the TSC, and they are required to understand and provide fixes for bugs logged by the TSC.

By spending time in RPE I am getting to know better how this organisation functions (e.g. process), the exact role the engineers play, what external pressures they have and more about how code changes go back into the Solaris product.  RPE have some communication with NRE (New Revenue Engineering) which is interesting for me as I do not usually encounter NRE engineers as part of my day-to-day job.

Once the rotation has finished I'll blog again about my experience here as compared to the TSC role I normally play.  For this this serves as a brief introduction to my next blog entry where I will discuss the bug I am working on.