I was fighting with my corporate SSL VPN setup (based on Juniper) for a while and finally found the cause of the problem: the Google toolbar!
Juniper proposes a “network connect” mode: “Network Connect is a software package from Juniper Networks that interfaces with its Secure Access hardware and provides a Virtual Private Network (VPN) solution. There are two software products that connect to Secure Access servers: Windows Secure Application Manager which, as you might guess, runs on Microsoft Windows; and Network Connect which runs on other platforms, in particular GNU/Linux.” (quote from mad-scientist.us).
My configuration is Ubuntu 8.10, Firefox 3.0.7 and Java 6. I followed the how-to written by ronet70 but, always the same behavior: once the Network Connect started, the browser froze (display in grey) a few seconds later.
After a lot of investigations, I disabled all my Firefox add-ons and it worked! The next step was to re-enable the add-ons one by one until I found the guilty: the Google Toolbar! To avoid this problem, I created a new Firefox profile (“firefox –profilemanager”) without any add-on to launch my VPN connection.
Google did not report relevant information. Did anybody already face the same issue? Is there Juniper experts who can give me more info? Please share!
Google Toolbar comes with a popup blocker, and the status window for the network connect is a popup. I believe it’s just enough to whitelist your VPN server domain for the popup blocker rather than disabling all add-ins. Good luck.