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

• Microsoft Windows NT Server versions 3.51 and 4.0 --------------------------------------------------------------------------

SUMMARY

You may want to know whether a user is connected by Remote Access Service (RAS) or 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.

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

   ARTICLE-ID: Q131011
   TITLE     : SMS: NETSPEED.COM Internals

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

   echo Beginning of logon script

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

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

   :ras
   echo This is a RAS connection
   pause

   :end