My company uses Cisco AnyConnect VPN, and over the past couple weeks, I’ve had an issue where it won’t let my laptop connect to my WiFi network at home. I’m using a ThinkPad notebook, and the AnyConnect app is basically overriding my Windows connection to the WiFi, and trying to connect on it’s own. But it keeps getting stuck on “Authenticating”. So if I want to connect to the internet at all (vpn or not) I need to use a Cat5 cable. I’ve had my company’s IT department look at it, and they got it working, but then Cisco downloaded updates, and it went back to the same problem.
It seems when they fixed it, the AnyConnect app didn’t have the option to choose a WiFi network, but it was only for logging into the VPN. I could go back to my IT department, but I hate to keep bothering them with the same issue if there’s something I might be able to do. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get AnyConnect to stop trying to connect to my WiFi?
My guess is that every time you connect to the VPN server, it’s installing the Network Access Manager (NAM) module. NAM can take over the wireless config from Windows, but it hasn’t been configured.
Ask your IT team if NAM module installation accidentally got enabled on the firewall.
If your configuration is anything like our configuration, you might be better off just connecting to any WiFi network via the anyconnect WiFi option. Our network admins have the windows WiFi dialog disabled due to Cisco handling this connection on our work laptops. Works fine.
If I had to take a guess to what is happening, it sounds like you had the downloaded app overwritten by a pre-provisioned (installed by IT by default on your computer) application, which would explain why now you have access to a WiFi prompt in AnyConnect. To fix this, if you’re able to uninstall anyconnect, you can then navigate to the address in the server field in your web browser to redownload the correct client.