I work on my project out of my company’s building. This is nice because it is convenient to my home. My work requires me to access the client’s networks all day long. Therefore I always VPN into the client’s network. Recently the client informed me that they were upgrading their VPN software. This could not be done while I was on a VPN. So I had to go visit the client’s site to have a physical access to their network during the upgrade.The install program was written by the sys admin staff of the client organization. These guys seem to know their stuff. I was a little apprehensive when their install program asked for my password. It needed it because the install requires a number of reboots of my machine. The install program wants to be able to control the reboot and re-login. Another thing that disturbed me was that the install was able to reboot and bypass the laptop disk encryption. I thought that was not possible.
The install took a long time. It required 4 reboots on my machine. Many of these reboots seemed to be related to uninstalling the old VPN software client from my machine. I did get an error message stating that an MSI file could not be accessed. My boss warned me that such a message would come up. I was advised to just ignore it. The install program tested itself. This required an additional reboot. It seemed strange because the test showed a dialog on the screen that seemed to count something.
Overall the install was quite impressive. The program locked out keyboard and mouse input so I could not mess up the install. It also did not require any human interaction at all. The install worked the first time around. I have not gone home yet to verify that I can still VPN into the client’s network. However I have a good feeling about it.
