Well, it has been one of those weeks.  Correction, it has been one of those months.  I am finally sitting back in my home office ready to jump on a clients VPN and Cisco AnyConnect decides that today is NOT the day.

So off to Google we go and sure enough there are a lot of blogs with comments about Cisco AnyConnect failing to initialize subsystem.  A common one I say said to set the GlobalUser default of I.E. to disabled in the registry or set the I.E. to work online.  However, that did not fix my problem.

A little more reading and I found Chris Tierney’s blog with the solution that worked for me.  Basically with the patches/hot fixes that Windows released over the weekend it messed with the compatibility modes.  So once you change the vpnui.exe to Windows 8 compatibility mode everything works like on charm.

Big Smiles….. Big Smiles…….

Okay, I have to say, a few things in this world drive me crazy, okay maybe a little more than a few.  Now I know this won’t apply to most people as they probably only have to ever VPN into one place, but for the folks in this world that VPN into multiple places, I often find that my Cisco Anywhere client tool often gets updated.  The problem I often find is that my default URL gets changed and the drop down never works, so I end up memorizing bizarre VPN urls for my various clients.

I just want to be able to have my most common client be first in the list and ideally have my other VPN urls in the drop down.  So I a fit of frustration I did a Google search yesterday and found how to change the default URL.  Look for the file preferences.xml which should be in your c:\users\{youruserid}\appdata\local\cisco\Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client\ folder, I had some issues finding this file as it might be in the roaming folder instead of local, and it might just be hidden.  In the file you can change the entry for:  DefaultHostName.

In order to get the drop down list to work properly, I found in my c:\programdata\cisco\Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client\Profile that there was an xml file that had my default profile in it.  In my trusty UltraEdit, I found the section for the ServerList and made a new HostEntry block for each of my VPN Servers.

<ServerList>
<HostEntry>
<HostName>{MyVPN-name-vpn1}</HostName>
<HostAddress>{MyVPN-address-vpn1}</HostAddress>
</HostEntry>
<HostEntry>
<HostName>{MyVPN-name-vpn2}</HostName>
<HostAddress>{MyVPN-address-vpn2}</HostAddress>
</HostEntry>
</ServerList>

Now my drop down box works.  Now I am a little bit happier. 🙂