Replication over VPN

I have a Delphi application that connects to SQL server 2K.

Recently another part of the company wanted to use the application, but the connection between us goes through a number of firewalls. The only solution that I have been able to come up with so far is for the new users to VPN into the server to use the application, but this is a real pain for them.

Is there an obvious alternative? No 're-write as a web app' please!

I have thought about setting the remote users up with a separatae server and then merge replicating betwen the two, but that would require a VPN connection to allow the replication to work (I presume). How would that work? What would open the VPN connection and close it after the replication was complete? What would happen to users that were connected at both the main server and the remote one when the VPN link was started?

Any thoughts gratefully received....Merge replication may require a complete redesign, unless your current design meets its requirements.|||Does the other division need both read and write access to the database? If not, you could transfer backups by sneakernet if nothing else.

Otherwise, talk to your network admins. It's their job to provide access through the firewalls for legitimate traffic. Better yet, get the head of the other division to expedite it.

Replication Over Internet via FTP

What is the syntax for the snapshop location setup referring to the "Client
path to this folder from the FTP root"? When my pull connects, it doesn't
seem to issue any change directory commands and does not find the snapshot
files which are there.
The client path is the path from the FTP root directory, so if your snapshot
directory is called TRSnapshot and is in the ftp root directory, the path
would be \TRSnapshot\ftp
Cheers,
Paul Ibison SQL Server MVP, www.replicationanswers.com
(recommended sql server 2000 replication book:
http://www.nwsu.com/0974973602p.html)
|||Thanks, worked like a charm but my main issue turned out to be the space in
the order details table in the Northwind db. I am doing a proof of concept
with that DB and it tried to run that script first and bombed.
"Paul Ibison" wrote:

> The client path is the path from the FTP root directory, so if your snapshot
> directory is called TRSnapshot and is in the ftp root directory, the path
> would be \TRSnapshot\ftp
> Cheers,
> Paul Ibison SQL Server MVP, www.replicationanswers.com
> (recommended sql server 2000 replication book:
> http://www.nwsu.com/0974973602p.html)
>
>
|||Jeffrey,
this isn't such a large table - at what point does it fail?
Might be worth using the compression if you have a slow link?
Cheers,
Paul Ibison SQL Server MVP, www.replicationanswers.com
(recommended sql server 2000 replication book:
http://www.nwsu.com/0974973602p.html)