I have been using the cisco vpn client for some time… I can typically stay connected all day long with no issues whatsoever. Recently I started seeing an issue where my suse 11.2 system would totally freeze after starting a VPN session. I changed from the pae kernel to the default… It seemed fine for a while until eventually I starting seeing the freezes again. After a ton of research about the problem, I finally figured out it is related to the vmware player 3.x package. I can stop the vmware services and the vpn client will work fine… but once I re-enable them, I can re-create the lockup issue. I removed the vmware player completely.
I am passing this along in case anybody else is seeing this issue… I have seen reports of this problem all over the internet across different linux distributions.
My system info in case it is relevant:
cpu: Intel(R) Core™2 Quad CPU Q6700 @ 2.66GHz
memory: 4 GB
OS: Linux 2.6.31.5-0.1-default i686
System: openSUSE 11.2 (i586)
KDE: 4.3.1 (KDE 4.3.1) “release 6”