By now you probably have heard or seen the complains that there is no viable 64 bit VPN client that will work with a Cisco VPN. I myself either used a Virtual Machine (Virtual Box) or I have a dual boot system where I boot into the Fisher Price looking OS to VPN into work.

Yesterday my suffering ended. I downloaded the Shrew Soft VPN Client For Windows and it has been working great. It will even import Cisco pcf files so that you don’t need to configure the VPN client if you already have the Cisco pcf files.

Download the Shrew Soft VPN client here: http://www.shrew.net/download/vpn

After it is installed start it up, click on file and then import. You should be presented with a dialog like the one in the screenshot below. Change the dropdown to Cisco PCF file and navigate to the location where your files are. Repeat the process for each PCF file you have.

After you have imported everything you need, click on one of the connections with a blue padlock icon and after that click on connect

<p>
  If everything is successful you should see something like the following in the text area above the credentials
</p>

<p>
  <em>config loaded for site 'connectDC.pcf'<br /> configuring client settings...<br /> attached to key daemon ...<br /> peer configured<br /> iskamp proposal configured<br /> esp proposal configured<br /> client configured<br /> local id configured<br /> pre-shared key configured<br /> bringing up tunnel ...<br /> network device configured<br /> tunnel enabled</em>
</p>

<p>
  If something is wrong you will see a message indicating a status in the same text area.
</p>

<p>
  Documentation is also available here: http://www.shrew.net/static/help-2.1.x/vpnhelp.htm
</p>

<p>
  The Shrew Soft VPN client is free but if it solves a problem for you consider donating something.
</p>

<p>
  That is it for this post, hopefully I will save a person or two from this 64 bit VPN hell.
</p>