Wouldn't it be best to have someone geographically closer for reasons of latency? I don't think it really matters much anymore and besides, it's not as if HECnet is a high bandwidth application :-) I'll be using Johnny's tunnel program. Then I think you're going to have to connect to his server, regardless of geography. open ports on the LAN, something I can't easily do. AFAIK, you'll have to open ports in either case. Multinet uses UDP port 700; I don't know about Johnny's program. LOKI:: Alphastation 250 4/266 running OpenVMS 8.3 FAFNIR:: VAXstation 4000-60 running OpenVMS 7.3 Do you already have TCP/IP on either of these machines? What/which one are you using? Bob