SIMS and VPN's!

Hi
I know there is already a thread to do with some of this but this is a slightly different problem!

I manage a network for a college that is spread over several sites in the town. they want to start using SIMS at the remote sites so I have setup a VPN connection with Windows to connect from one of the remote sites to the site which has the SIMS server.

Firstly, for some reason, everytime SIMS loads on the remote client, it tries to run the update. This has already been installed so i don't know why its doing it but, as its over a VPN it taking ages every time.

The main problem is down to the speed. Both sites have a 10Meg fibre DSL connection and are on the same WAN so there shouldn't be a huge speed problem I wouldn't have thought but there is!

Any suggestions?

I have sims running from some teachers homes over vpn so Sims can work over very slow connections. Sorry but cant help with the updates issue.

It wont be a cheap option but i think that you would be better using sims on a Terminal Server hosted on the same site as sims is.

It will just be a quick as loading it in your main building...

Quick fix, remove simsload from the shortcut. Proper fix, check the simssetupsdirectory in sims.ini on the machine and ensure it's upgraded all the bits correctly (ie logon as administrator)

Are they running sims locally, just connecting to a remote point, or running vpn, then remote accessing a machine local to sims?
Upgrades are done when the version of simsapplications is detected to be different between the line in simsload.ini and the version on the server. Could there be a discrepancy in where it's looking.
I've also seen this when the user didn't have permissions to edit the local files and so it never recorded the fact an update was done and kept trying to do it.
You could check these things, but to bypass, look at the properties of the sims program icon, you'll see it runs two things, one as a parameter to the first. Take out the first part, and just run pulsar and it will bypass the upgrade progress. Obviously this is temporary while you fix the issue, and if you do an upgrade say after friday, you'll have to tell them to run the full simsload version so it upgrades.

edit: or what matt said! :p it must be in sims.ini, not simsload.ini like i thought.

I've had a similar sounding problem before, when trying to get SIMS running across different domains, through a router; admin domain with SIMS to the curriculum domain. This happened at several schools. The workstation would appear to try and install SIMSCentralServerSetup.exe (oddly enough). But this took over ten minutes! The reason appeared to be because the DNS suffix search order list did not include the suffix for the admin domain and Windows would just sit there trying to reverse lookup the SIMS box on the admin network, even though all the ini files pointed to IP addresses. It would eventually time-out and run SIMS. As soon as I added the admin domain suffix to the DNS suffix search list, it sailed through in no time.

Any good to you?