(Michael Chinen)

I’ve been using cisco VPN on android. It works pretty well, but sometimes, I would run into an issue where DNS wouldn’t resolve while connected (e.g. google.com fails to load in chrome and says DNS host lookup fail). This would happen and leave me out of luck for a week for that device. The internet, of course, advised me to restart, of course. (someone else probably said I should zap my pram on my mac and see if that fixed it). Then I started getting the error when connecting to VPN:
"System configuration settings could not be applied. A VPN connection will not be established."

Turns out the problem I was having was that the IP Settings for my wifi connection were ‘static’, and they should be ‘DHCP’ so the dns can be updated to pull the VPN’s DNS to resolve hostnames properly. DHCP is usually the default, but someone probably changed this shared device to a static connection, which lets you override DNS. To do this you go to your settings app, then wifi, then *press and hold* the wifi connection you are on. On other devices there might be some other way of getting to the wifi details screen, but it should look something like this:

Make sure you are on DHCP and not static. If there’s a box that says ‘static’ uncheck it. If your router is special and doesn’t let you do DHCP, you might not be able to use Cisco VPN from that connection.

Also, this seems to fix those pesky timeouts after 30 minutes to an hour (I guess something was pumped via DCHP that lets the connection live.