Microsoft KB Archive/173530

= How to Determine Whether a Client Is Connected by RAS or LAN =

Article ID: 173530

Article Last Modified on 2/27/2007

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APPLIES TO


 * Microsoft Windows 2000 Server
 * Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server
 * Microsoft Windows NT Server 3.51
 * Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 Standard Edition

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This article was previously published under Q173530





SUMMARY
You may want to know whether a user is connected by Remote Access Service (RAS) or to the local area network (LAN) if you use logon scripts to map drives or to set environment variables when a user logs on to a domain. This can be especially helpful if the logon script contains a large number of commands. This article discusses one method of determining if a user is connecting by RAS.



MORE INFORMATION
Microsoft Systems Management Server includes a utility, Netspeed.com, that checks to see if a user has a slow connection. This utility, however, does not verify that there is an active RAS connection on the client.

NOTE: CheckRas.exe is not included with the Back Office Resource Kit 4.5.

For more information on Netspeed.exe, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

ARTICLE-ID: 131011

TITLE : SMS: NETSPEED.COM Internals

The BackOffice Resource Kit includes Checkras.exe, a utility that checks for RAS connections on the client instead of trying to determine the link speed. You can use the Checkras.exe utility in your logon script to check whether a user is connected by a RAS connection, and then include commands in your logon script based on the results returned by Checkras.exe.

The following is a sample Windows NT domain logon script that uses Checkras.exe:

@echo off echo Checking for existence of RAS Files

if exist %windir%\system32\RASAPI32.DLL goto ras_status if exist %windir%\system\RASAPI32.DLL goto ras_status goto notras

echo Checking for existence of Checkras.exe if exist %windir%\checkras.exe goto yes_checkras copy \\server\netlogon\checkras.exe %windir%

echo Checking for RAS connection %windir%\checkras if errorlevel 1 goto ras echo This is not a RAS connection goto end

echo RAS is not installed on this system goto end

echo RAS connection detected REM Enter RAS specific command here.



Additional query words: sms

Keywords: kbarttypeinf kbhowto kbinfo kbinterop kbnetwork KB173530

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