My company has been experiencing some problems with SecureRemote/SecureClient running on win9x clients. Over the past few months, we've been rolling out Firewall-1, and we're at the stage in the game where we want to start using Secure Remote. However, we've encountered a pretty serious problem. It seems to work fine on WinNT/2000 clients, but on 95, 98, Me, etc.. we're having quite a bit of trouble.

The problem is this. A user who dials up to their ISP, can connect and successfully authenticate to the firewall via secureremote. However, this only gives them an IP level connection. What we need is for them to be able to log on to our NT domain, so they can access file servers, Exchange and SQL applications, etc. NT and 2000 clients don't appear to have any trouble, presumably because of these OS's ability to cache credentials and other security differences. Also, 95 and 98 users who are on cable, DSL, or other always-on internet connections don't appear to have any problem. I'm assuming the problem lies in the fact that the users need to first authenticate to their ISP, then authenticate to our domain. Apparently 9x doesn't like this process.

Has anyone successfully gotten this to work with 95 and/or 98? Our reseller has been less than helpful, and checkpoint themselves have been of little help so I'm really hoping someone out there can help me with this. Secure Remote is one of the biggest reasons we bought this product, and our difficulties in getting it working have not been received well by management, nor have our reseller's lack of follow through on helping with these problems. It's to the point where it'll be a tough sell to keep Checkpoint in place if this isn't resolved soon. I've tried the usual resources - Phoneboy.com, Nokia's web site, Checkpoint and Reseller support, so my posting here is really a last effort.

Our firewalls are Nokia IP 650s, running IPSO 3.4.1 and Firewall-1 SP3. We've tried every available secureremote build with the same result. If anyone wants any further information I'd be more than happy to provide it.

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

[FW-1] SecureRemote/SecureClient on win9x w/ NT authentication..