Losing connection to server

[Remon Vos]

Hi,

I've run into some problems using the ODBC 3.51.12 connector over an ADSL line.
The setup is like this: Two sites using a Cisco 800 series VPN router. The database (version 4.1) is running on one site and the other site connects via an ODBC 3.51.12 connector.

The first problem was that during the night my software was running "idle" (no traffic to the server) which resulted in a disconnection by the server due to a timeout.
This problem was easily solved by creating a timer which runs a "dummy" query every minute, this way the mysql server keeps the connection open.
Does anyone know of a better way to do this?

The second problem was that the cisco's tend to fragment my ip packets which the mysql server apparently doesn't like, resulting in a "Lost conenction ....." This was solved by setting the "don't fragment bit" in the routers.
But the connection still tends to break up (mostly at night).
I tried to replace the cisco's with some cheap linksys routers. This works perfectly, besides the fact that I no longer have a VPN anymore.
Putting the cisco's back also brought back the connection problems.

Does anyone know how to handle these kind of "unstable" connections (in combination with ODBC and Visual Basic)?
Or does anyone know how to get the cisco's to work?

Regards,

Remon Vos.