Intro
I often have trouble getting a clean disconnect when shutting down my JunOS Pulse client. As often as not it hangs while displaying Disconnecting… A reboot seemed a little drastic to me so I found a kinder, gentler way to reset things. Read the details if this applies…
The details
When it’s hanging you will have an additional adapter not normally present called JunOS virtual adapter or something like that. To get to this adapter in Windows 7 type network in the Run text box. Click on Network and Sharing Center; then Change adapter settings.
Find the JunOS virtual adapter.
Right-click and disable it.
That’s it!
Your disconnect should then complete and the virtual adapter will eventually disappear on its own. I imagine you would need administrator access to your PC in order to be able to do this.
The catch
And this is a very big catch. This did save me a reboot as promised. But it has a huge drawback. The next time you try to use the JunOS Pulse client it will never finish connecting! So while it is trying to connect you have to repeat the steps above but this time enable the adapter!
I was really stumped when I first encountered this problem and couldn’t connect.
Why does this work?
Well, the symptoms I was experiencing during hanging is that the virtual adapter JunOS creates is present and keeps its IP address, as you can see form an output of ipconfig /all. So I thought there should be a way to remove the adapter with a command-line command. But when I clicked on the adapter I reasoned that if I could simply remove the IP address then I would achieve what I needed and restore my regular connectivity. Disabling it did that and it worked!
How do I get myself in this situation?
I use VPN. Then I leave my laptop for a length of time. Eventually the laptop hibernates, keeping its memory of running JunOS Pulse. Next I bring it to an office with a physical LAN port and that JunOS virtual adapter is still hanging around upon wake-up and the Pulse client is stuck disconnecting.
Conclusion
I have shown a method of saving yourself a reboot if your JunOS Pulse client is hanging upon disconnecting. However I have given you enough rope to hang yourself. You will never connect again unless you undo those very same steps the next time you try to connect!
The JunOS Pulse client is provided by Juniper Networks.
References
I explain how to work on a Juniper SA appliance in this post.
6 replies on “Fixing a hanging JunOS Pulse VPN client login”
This works beautifully.
I’ve been experiencing the same behaviour in a stagged environment I’m preparing for a production network and reasoned the same conclusion. I can’t wait to validate it Monday morning. The real challenge is that corporate policy locks the windows host after 5min of inactivity. I’ll have to investigate how long a user has to wake their machine before the adapter is locked into memory since a reboot isn’t practical in a production environment and administrative rights are certain to be restricted for most users.
Well let us know how it goes for your situation.
I also have this issue after the Junos Pulse session I can’t shutdown my laptop or restart it , also some times J-Puls disconnect and never comeback unless I restart my laptop, so I make force restart by power button,
and this is disrupting solution.
actually in the network adapters area I can’t see Junos virtual network adapter as you stated above.
My situation is basically the same only it does not release the adapter when I disconnect and a reboot is the only way for me to get reconnected,
there has to be a registry entry to force this to release