Unfortunately, the Cisco AnyConnect client for Mac conflicts with Pow. And by "conflicts", I mean it causes a grey-screen-of-death kernel panic anytime you connect to the VPN and Pow is installed.
As an alternative, there is OpenConnect, a command-line client for Cisco's AnyConnect SSL VPN.
Here's how to get it set up on Mac OS X:
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OpenConnect can be installed via homebrew:
brew update brew install openconnect
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Install the Mac OS X TUN/TAP driver
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(Optional) Running openconnect requires sudo, presumably because it affects resolution of DNS. So, I added password-less sudo ability for the openconnect command.
sudo visudo -f /etc/sudoers
And added this line:
%admin ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/local/bin/openconnect
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(Optional) When connecting to your SSL VPN, openconnect may complain about a "self-signed certificate" being in the chain and force you to explicitly accept it every time. The self-signed cert is actually the root certficate and (hopefully) is one with implicit trust (i.e. trusted by browsers), so we can safely trust it by specifying the CA file after exporting it from KeyChain:
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Determine the name your root certificate (i.e. visit your SSL VPN in Chrome, click the green lock, click "Certificate Information")
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Open the Keychain Access App
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Search the "System Roots" keychain to find your root certificate and select it
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File
>Export Items...
the certificate as a.pem
file somewhere on your hard drive (I put it in~/.ssh/<certificate name>.pem
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Connect!
sudo openconnect --user=<VPN username> --cafile=<.pem file from step 4.3> <your vpn hostname>
The only thing you should be prompted for is your VPN password. I added the command to my aliases file.
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To disconnect, just Ctrl-c in the window where you started the VPN connection.
I had an incident after an unclean VPN exit where later the VPN hostname could not be found. I guess the DNS resolver was messed up. I was forced to reboot to fix it so I could reconnect to the VPN.
I'm not running AnyConnect and OpenConnect in parallel. I was saying that I've solved the routing issues generated by Cisco AnyConnect. By that I mean that I switched from AnyConnect to OpenConnect.
Using Cisco Anyconnect, I always got a 10. route which was messing up other custom routes I had. Cisco AnyConnect takes over the routing table and it's not allowing you to modify the routes even if I was manually adding a route it was not actually reflecting in the routing table. So I've stopped using Cisco Anyconnect and replace it with openconnect.
I don't have a solution to your problem. I guess you could run 2 openconnect in parallel, one for a VPN and the other open to replace the Cisco AnyConnect. At least this is how I would do it.