I have an Airport Express that I use, aside from basic network connectivity, for streaming music and printing with my Powerbook. Several months ago I started noticing that all of these things would periodically stop working. The first time it happened I thought the Airport Express had just glitched and needed to be reset. For some reason, this reset normally fixed my problem. But there was that rare occassion when no amount of hardware resets and network voodoo fixed the problem. After a while I realized that it might be a problem with my VPN client. From time to time I need to use a Cisco VPN client to connect to resources made available by my university or my program. After some poking around I found the daemon, killed it, and restored sanity to my network setup.
It turns out that even though the Cisco VPN client requires you to load a horribly designed GUI application while you are connected to the network, it also loads a daemon on startup. (I assume this is for some basic firewall functionality, but I don’t know for sure.) There is also no user interface provided by the client GUI to start or stop this daemon. Which is problamatic, because sometimes the client itself complains that the daemon hasn’t been loaded. Of course, it also doesn’t tell you that definitively. It just complains about “error fffffffffffffch”.
