Cisco VPN on iPhone

Filed in archive Protection on July 26, 2008

I have tried using the previous iPhone firmware's VPN support (L2TP and PPTP) and both worked great with my XServe running both VPN protocols. However, the previous firmware did not have support for the popular Cisco VPN IPsec protocol. The current iPhone 2.0 firmware added more enterprise networking functionality, such as, push technologies, enterprise wifi settings and more VPN functionality.

Configuring the Cisco VPN is pretty straightforward on your phone. However, I used the iPhone Configuration Utility, a free tool for enterprises deploying iPhones, to create profiles for my iPhone.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

I created two configurations, one for my university's Cisco VPN account and another to turn off EDGE on my iPhone. Here's where you setup your Cisco VPN account details.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Whilst you can turn off 3G on your iPhone 3G, there is no way to turn off EDGE, at least on networks that are officially supported by Apple. What you can do is to either delete the APN settings or just make sure that APN address is not valid.

After you have created the profile, hit Share and send it to an e-mail address that is accessible from your iPhone. Once it is in your iPhone, just install the profile and that is it!