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

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.

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  (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/131011/EN-US/ )
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: