excessive bandwidth usage

[vpn.user]

Hi all,

I work remotely using wingate vpn, over a jetstream connection, and everything about it works perfectly. The only gripe I have, with telecom being sooo greedy and limiting their full speed home account to a measly maximum of 1000MB, is that I blow the monthly MB cap every month.

Is there any way to reduce the overheads on the VPN as this is obviously where the large data transfers are taking place? The majority of files I access are text files no bigger than 10k but the transfer (I've got a bandwidth monitor Installed on my machine so I can see what's going on)goes up rapidly in 100k chunks whenever I access something remotely.

Any suggestions appreciated. (or do I need to bite the bullet and pay Telecom more money by going to one of their business plans?)

Thanks.

[adrien]

depending on how you access network resources, you can reduce bandwidth requirements.

For instance creating a drive mapping to a shared directory means you don't need to send the full UNC pathname to files on that remote resource across the link all the time.

Also network broadcast traffic can mount up as well, especially if you are connecting into a network that has a lot of machines running in a normal Peer-peer configuration. Options for this are to move everything to WINS, or alternatively if you disable UDP relay in the ENS routing tab, and use entries in your LMHosts file to find the machines you need to connect to, you can cut out broadcast traffic.

I use VPN at home over jetstream as well, and so I know what you mean about the traffic usage...

Also if you pick up another file manager. explorer.exe uses a bunch of bandwidth just to display icons (it reads them out of the files). This means it is a real slow dog over a VPN and a bandwidth hog. File manager from NT 3.51 still ships on NT and 2k I believe and is much more resource friendly.

Adrien