How To Get Check Point Secure Client Working With Sprint EVDO
When I was at the car dealer yesterday giving my car some service love, I hung out at the dealership while the repair was taking place. My dealer is pretty good–they give you a coupon (or two) for a free latte while you wait for your car to be serviced. They offer WiFi throughout their waiting area. They also have a “lounge” where you can either use one of the computers they have or use your own.
Despite the dealer having WiFi, I didn’t use it. Why? Their system requires reauthenticating every two hours, which gets old when I know I am going to be there for at least twice that long. Instead, I decided to use my Sprint EVDO dongle.
Unfortunately, I spent a long time fighting with the Sprint Connection Manager software (version 1.10.0023.0) instead of working. When I tried to use it to connect, then started up my VPN to connect to the office, my EVDO connection would unceremoniously disconnect. I don’t remember my Verizon card ever doing this.
I eventually figured out how to get this combination working. The hint is in the graphic here. Sprint’s software–and presumably Verizon’s software–are simply front ends for the standard Windows dial-up networking. Sprint’s software also has this NDIS mode in it–make sure it’s set to RAS before you do this trick.
In Check Point Secure Client (which us old-timers still call SecuRemote), I told it to use a Dial-up connection, which shows up in the Connection window. In my case, I ticked the Use Dial-up option and used the connection called CDMA. There was another one called 3G Connection that I didn’t try. After this, Secure Client properly brought up the EVDO connection and started my VPN. The connection didn’t drop once and worked reliably for the rest of the time I was at the dealer.
I left the Sprint Connection Manager software running, but I don’t believe it was necessary. It continued to show me signal strength and the like, but I did not see any details about how much data I was sending and receiving. That’s ok, just as long as my EVDO worked.
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Tags: check point, secure client, securemote, sprint, sprint connection manager, sprint evdo Fnord
Comment by spg
i am starting to wonder how things would work if i took one of those dongle’s and than called STI Mobile and asked them to activate it on their prepaid plan with $0.19/day unlimited web browsing option? i imagine that the dongle is network locked and so would need a bit of a hack. i am going to look into this a bit more; i think it may be very interesting.
Comment by Martin
Hi,
I see that you have a lots of experience with Check Point. My new job is forcing me to use a “Check Point” VPN-1 client. I have one question. I am a Linux lover. Do you have any idea if it’s possible this “Check Point VPN-1″ client to be replaced with something in Linux [openswan I suspect] and be able to successful connect my Linux with corporate network ?
Thank you !