mac os x and cisco vpn problem

To solve the well-known problem in Mac OS X (Lion) related to a Cisco VPN, you can follow these steps.

The problem is: using the built in VPN client to connect to a Cisco ASA, there is a problem related to DNS.
There is no way, using the GUI, to solve the issue. You can set network interface order, but your corporate network DNS will never be involved. So you can ping a connect to your private network using IP addresses, but not domain names (if they are not on a public internet accessible DNS).

With an administrative account, from terminal, create a directory called resolver under /etc

sudo mkdir /etc/resolver

Create a file (called in example with your private domain)

sudo vi /etc/resolver/work.com

Edit it (according to your network)

domain work.com
nameserver 10.10.0.127
nameserver 10.10.0.128
port 53

So, to resolve hostnames ending with work.com, the system will use the right DNS.

Safari works. Using terminal, ping works, but nslookup and host commands do not work.

openindiana, virtualbox and bridged network

openindiana, virtualbox and bridged network

As far I can see, there are problems assigning the physical guest interface (i.e. igb0) to the bridged virtualbox VM network interface.

 

To avoid problems (i.e. the virtual machine hangs), you must first create a vnic

dladm create-vnic -l igb0 vnic0

... but ... it is not sufficient: you must assign the MAC address of the vnic to the bridged network interface of the VM

dladm show-vnic
LINK         OVER    SPEED  MACADDRESS        MACADDRTYPE    VID
vnic0        igb0    1000   2:8:20:68:25:9b   random    0

If you don't assign the vnic MAC address to the VM network adapter, simply the VM networking doesn't work.