Imports,self-hosted RE, vpns, and speed?

Soula Dimitrey

I hope everyone out there is safe and well.  What strange times we are living.


Like most of us, I am working from home.  I am hoping to pick some brains on something I have run in to.  Currently I am attempting to do a constituent appeal import that I have done many, many times before.  It's about 2500 records, with only four fields to map.  Easy peasy.  We log in remotely via our vpn.  It generally works well, except for the fact that there are some speed issues.  The import I am trying to do, for example, normally takes me minutes.  In attempting to do it from home, however, RE keeps dying on me. And in watching the progress bar in import it is painfully slow, as in maybe 500 records are imported 45 minutes later. Then, after awhile,  I get a variety of error messages, including runtime error 0/97/440, or automation error.


I did a support call, however the feedback I received amounted to 'your self-hosted, so you need to contact your own IT support as it must have to do with your VPN."  


I have discussed this speed issue with our own IT in the past, and according to them, the VPN shouldn't really affect speed. 


In the meanwhile, I have attempted this import twice.  In the query created with each import, it shows as zero records imported.  However if I go into the records of my test file, the import shows up twice in the appeals tab.  Argh.  Thankfully my test file was small, so no big deal to delete.


Does anyone out there have any thoughts on what might be going on and what could be done?  Thanks in advance everyone

Jason Black

Hi Soula,


That is frustrating. I'm self-hosted on RE and using VPN to connect, and doing imports. I've done this two ways in the past. At first, when working from home I attempted to run imports on a laptop with the RE client installed, connected through VPN. It went just as you described - kept timing out. Later, I used Remote Desktop to link my laptop to my office desktop through the VPN, and ran RE imports from that machine. It worked much better.


During the current work from home period, I opted to bring my desktop home with me. I connect to our local server through VPN, and imports are still working fine, though slower than usual, since I am on my home wifi instead of wired into the college's network. But I haven't had timeout issues.


If you have the option of accessing your office desktop with Remote Desktop, I recommend it. You might talk with your IT folks to set that up if you don't have that currently. If that's not available, then I'm afraid any other solution is beyond my experience.


Best of luck!

robert badley

VPN and then a Remote Desktop Connection to a running desktop in the office or to the actual RE server is the way to go. If you run RE on your laptop at homethere is just too much data that has to shuttle back and forth across the connection and you will be frustrated.


Robert

Dennis Ladnier

I echo Robert's response - use VPN to RDP to a local desktop in your office