Help determining network bottleneck

[belby]

Sometimes i work from home. I have a wireless router and normally connect locally through that. Then i use the Cisco VPN client to get on to my office network. Once i'm connected through the VPN i usually use RDP to get to my XP machine at work.
sometimes it works pretty good, and sometimes the lag is unbearable. Any ideas on how to figure out where the bottleneck is?

I've rebooted both machines and reconnected..same issue
I connected to my local LAN via cat 5 cable (instead of wireless)... same issue.

There's not much i can do (administratively) with the VPN concentrator and all that. But i'd like to figure out if it's something on my end, or the office network. and if it's the office netwok (which is my guess), how can determine that, and what could i tell our network admins to fix?

my DSL is 1.5/384, which should be plenty (so i thought) for RDP.

any thoughts?

 

[ktwebb]

Does anything change on your work destop? For instance when you turn on html on the desktop, active desktop, on an XP machine an RD session becomes practically unusable.

You could always put a sniffer like ethereal on your machine and capture some traffic when your slowdown occurs. Regular use as well so you have a template to bounce the slowtime capture off of. My guess would be it's at the remote end.

 

[belby]

nothing changes that i can think of. I don't think i've ever activated 'active desktop' it's definitely not enabled on the local machine and i just tried to check on the remote (work) machine but it didn't even have a 'web' tab under control panel-->display-->Desktop-->Customize Desktop.. i wonder if that's because i'm in remotely..

i've never tried ethereal... should i install it on the local machine or remote?

thanks