All, I'm having to deal with a VPN timeout on TCP/telnet connections which 80% of the time are not a problem, but 20% of the time it causes disaster. The Problem is that the VPN times out any such connection that does not have data traveling on it for more than 30 minutes. Not that onerous, except when your running rman on a fairly large database. SO does anyone know how to make rman work like imp/exp's feedback mechanism?? That little dot certainly has saved my bacon more than I care to think. Dick Goulet Senior Oracle DBA