MacOS – Cisco Smart Tunnel crashes Safari. Can it be made to work on Mac OS X

crashmacossafarivpn

I deal with a customer who has provided me a SSL VPN address. When I log in it downloads a .jnlp file, and then some files are created in /tmp.

The meat of how it works, is it tries to run Safari with a downloaded library included:

DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES=/tmp/narwhal.dylib /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari

Safari soon crashes with a segfault:

PlugIn Path:       /tmp/narwhal.dylib
Crashed Thread:  3  Dispatch queue: com.apple.networking.connection.0x7fe0d0468fc0
Exception Type:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000068
OS Version:      Mac OS X 10.7.1 (11B26)

(See the full stack trace.)

The only other mention I can find of this error is on the Apple forum, which suggests it worked in 10.5.8 but not 10.6 or later. I have a colleague that is running 10.6.8 and it works for him. I am running Lion (10.7.1). Running Safari in 32 bit mode does not seem to make a difference, nor whether I prefer 32- or 64-bit Java.

My end goal is "connect to the SSL VPN". The administrators of the server aren't able to support Mac users. I can connect fine with Windows.

Is there a way to fix this, or perhaps take the details from the .jnlp file, and use a different Cisco client, which works on Mac OS X?

Best Answer

As of May 30, 2012, Smart Tunnel on OS X 10.7 is officially not supported by Cisco and it looks like it won't be an easy fix to support it because it shares many attributes of the Flasback Trojan. I use VMware Fusion to run a Windows VM on my Mac for just this sort of thing.

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