I've wrote a simple little VB program to solve a problem I was having, and figured it might help the rest of you out. PROBLEM: I recently set up a remote office for a side client, with an identical VPN capable firewall as a central site. It was very easy to set up a Dial-On-Demand IP-SEC based VPN between this site and the central site, and once the VPN was up and running, terminal sessions went fine over the link. The problem is, it takes close to 7 seconds from when the remote router "hears" traffic bound for the central office to negotiate the connection. Which means that the users get "Remote server unavailable" messages the first three or four times that they try to connect (by running a shortcut to a RDP 5.1 file). Have you ever tried to tell a user how to ping, and then how to stop the ping when they start getting replies? It doesn't work well... SOLUTION: I wrote a quick little program in VB6 that allows you to specify (and save) an IP address and ping that IP address, with very little user interaction. It also has a Success and Failure threshold, which, when crossed, stop the ping process and notify the user one way or the other. I now set this up on user machines, pointed at an IP address on the other side of the VPN, with a success threshold of 3 (3 successful ping replies received) and a failure threshold of 20 (20 failed replies... that's about 20 seconds of no VPN, so there must be something wrong). I set it to "Auto start" so that, when the user click's the icon it automatically starts the pings, and then notifies the user when done. I have it bundled up into an MSI file, and it's about 1.2kb. Fits on a floppy if you need it to. I call it "Get It Up!" since what it does is get the VPN up and running for you. My wife hates the name... Email me OFFLIST, and I can send you a copy. If I get too many requests, maybe I'll convince Jim to put in in the Thin.net files area. Hope it helps someone, Glenn Sullivan, MCSE+I MCDBA David Clark Company Inc. ******************************************************************** This Week's Sponsor: RTO Software - TScale TScale increases Terminal Server capacity. Get 30-40% more users per server to save $$$ and time. Add users now! - Not more servers. If you?re using Citrix, you must learn about TScale! Free 30-day eval: http://www.rtosoft.com/Enter.asp?ID=80 ================================== To Unsubscribe, set digest or vacation mode or view archives use the below link. http://thethin.net/win2000list.cfm