I'm a network admin. for a small lawfirm. I've got Windows Server 2003 Standard handling VPN, with a Symantec VPN 100 firewall routing PPTP traffic to the Win 2003 server. VPN works pretty much flawlessly, but it doesn't seem to be fast at all. Copying a 1MB file will take about 5-10 minutes.
In the office we have a fractional T-1... so we're really only allocating 512KB to the data side (rest goes to phone system)... but, it still seems unreasonably slow to me even with the 1/2 T-1.
My firewall has a throughput of 10MB... I'm also only using 1 NIC in my Windows Server to handle internal/external traffic (bear in mind that this is an 8-10 user office).
Users really start to complain when MS Word comes into play. They're pretty set on trying to save files to the remote server from within Word and they also like to start in Word and open mapped drive files via VPN fom Word's typical File-Open interface. This never seems to work well... and often times out. My instructions have always been "drag and drop... work locally... drag and drop back to the server..." but it's hard to teach old lawyers new tricks.
Any advice on how to speed things up or which variable would really be the bottleneck in my scenario? I guess what would really be helpful would be some best practice suggestions on speeding up VPN file transfers. The actual connection to VPN is lightning fast. I get the "You are now Connected" prompt immediately after clicking on the connection shortcut. There are no problems or delays with the actual connection, just the file transfers. Remote users are all on fast broadband (DSL/Cable) connections... so that shouldn't really be a variable. I'm relatively new to VPN... so I'm really just not sure what its limitations are. It may just not be the fastest way to get things done. Since a lot of the attorneys here use laptops, Terminal Services doesn't seem to be a viable workaround (what would they terminal into?... an application server? They won't spring for that).
Although, I can tell you that everything I do through Remote Desktop is super fast and while less robust than PC Anywhere 11, it's still faster. Which makes me think that PPTP may just be a slow or inefficient protocol.
Set me straight here...
