I’ve been testing Check Point’s new Capsule a lot lately. I am pretty impressed with what I have seen so far. The client apps create a VPN tunnel to your gateway in Check Point’s Capsule Cloud. There is a slight difference between the approach for the iOS and Android devices.
The iOS-based devices (iPhone and iPad) that I have use a single app for VPN and VPN to Check Point’s Capsule Cloud. My iOS devices use “Capsule Connect” whether I am connecting to a customer’s site, or up to Check Point’s Cloud.
However, it is a little different with Android devices. There are actually two clients listed on Google Play: Capsule VPN and Capsule Connect. As a matter of fact if I search for “Check Point Capsule” in Google Play, it will offer up Capsule VPN as the best hit. Capsule VPN will NOT work with Capsule Cloud (even though it is a VPN client). Unfortunately nothing in the app description warns you of this.
What will end up happening is that when you scan the QR code or use the registration key for Capsule Cloud, you will not be able to finish the registration process. You will get an error that looks like this.
Luckily the solution is fairly simple (once you know the issue): don’t use Capsule VPN (that is for connecting to your enterprise VPN), use Capsule Connect for Android.
So why am I writing about this? Well first off if you sign up for Check Point’s Capsule trial, they will send you an email with the correct link to the respective app. However, you can assign multiple devices to the same account (which is great from a licensing perspective). When you add additional devices you may decide to install the app manually. So in my case after I setup my iPhone and iPad, I wanted to setup my Nexus 7 (Android) using the same account. I don’t receive mail on that device, so I just manually installed what I thought was the correct app…and it wasn’t. I tried scanning the QR code off my laptop’s screen. Nothing. Then I tried manually typing in the registration key. Nothing. With the wrong app, you will not get connected. Hopefully Check Point will merge the two Android apps together, or change the app descriptions to warn users.
Things to remember:
- Check Point will send you a link to the correct app
- If you are manually installing an app with Android use the correct app
- iTunes has a single app for ALL VPN connectivity (enterprise and Cloud)
- Google Play (Android) has two VPN apps (they function differently)
- For Android make sure to use Capsule Connect for Capsule Cloud