I have been playing around with a few ideas on how to backup a server I have that is on the other side of town.

One of the problems I have is that the Internet provider blocks VPN traffic, and most other ways I know of getting a secure connection.

The one thing I can do is use remote desktop. After some experimentation, I have been able to schedule remote backups every night using robocopy, and a remote desktop connection.

I will show you what I did to get this to work:

First, start out by properly configuring your remote desktop connection to…

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I was setting up an offsite backup system for our source code. I wanted to use the VPN client within windows to connect the two machines.

One of the problems with this idea is that I only wanted this connection to be active while the source code was being copied

It turns out that it is very simple to do. Once you have your VPN connection setup, take note of its name.

Then, inside of your batch file you can add this command to connect to the VPN

rasphone -d wimberlynet

Notice, that the name of my network connection was wimberlynet. You would replace that with the name of your network.

At the end of your script, you can disconnect by using this line:

rasphone -h wimberlynet

One gotcha is that you need to make sure you go into the properties of the VPN connection, and make sure prompting is disabled:

And finally, make sure you connect to it once and save the password, and you will be able to totally automate your VPN connection.