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

ID: Q173530

The information in this article applies to:

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.

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 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

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

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

 :notras
 echo RAS is not installed on this system
 goto end

 :ras
 echo RAS connection detected
 REM Enter RAS specific command here.

 :end

Additional query words: sms 


Keywords          : kbinterop kbnetwork ntdomain kbhowto NTInterop nthowto ntnetserv kbinfo NTSrv 
Version           : WinNT:3.51,4.0
Platform          : winnt 
Issue type        : kbhowto kbinfo

Last Reviewed: January 16, 1999