Thanks for the tips. I definitely agree that being flexible, as far as possible, and changing things in response to design challenges that arise is important.

If you're comfortable with ASP.NET, then stick with ASP.NET - there are plenty of large[^] sites[^] built[^] with ASP.NET[^] which easily handle much more traffic that you're anticipating. "These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer

I'd say there was soemthing wrong with your existing NAS. A firmware update might fix it, if there is one. But, unless the server is being pounded constantly with tons of disk and network I/O, you're really not going to see any kind of performance benefit by going to an external NAS. A guide to posting questions on CodeProject[^] Dave Kreskowiak

Oddly enough, I'm doing that right now! I can almost read a PE file by hand and know exactly what I'm looking at. I writing a utility that has a requirement of checking the exports of a specified .DLL's to see if function names entered by the suer are valid. How little did I know the hell I'd have to go through just to get those names! A guide to posting questions on CodeProject[^] Dave Kreskowiak Microsoft MVP Visual Developer - Visual Basic      2006, 2007, 2008 But no longer in 2009...

Alright, well it seems as if the TCP connection is being established now. The next packet that the client sends contains 26 bytes of data, which I've intercepted and read with a packet sniffer. My VB code receives this package and I've written it to display what's received, but it doesn't show the whole lot, for some reason. While the packet sniffer shows that the packet data contains the client name I only get the first four or five bytes of data displayed from my VB code. The rest seems to be ignored, even though a line I've written in to count the number of bytes indicates that the whole lot is being received. I've used a 'Do While' loop to make sure that the buffer is empty before displaying the data but still I only get those few bytes. Any idea why the packet sniffer is intercepting data in the packet which my application isn't receiving/displaying?

Ok, with a lot more Googling and trial and error I think I finally cracked it! Dim sText As String = "00 00 84 00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 00 0A 4D 61 67 69 63 69 6E 66 6F 53 06 4D 4C 49 4E 4B 53 04 5F 75 64 70 05 6C 6F 63 61 6C 00 00 0C 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 1E 1C 31 33 38 32 35 33 31 35 32 30 39 31 30 30 39 32 30 37 4D 61 67 69 63 69 6E 66 6F 53 00 C0 17 00 0C 00 01 00 00 00 1E 00 02 C0 34" Dim sData() As String Dim iByte As Long, lByteCount As Long sData = Split(Trim(sText), " ") lByteCount = UBound(sData) + 1 Dim BData(lByteCount - 1) As Byte For iByte = 0 To lByteCount - 1 BData(iByte) = CByte("&H" & sData(iByte)) Next iByte

That is fantastic, thank you so much for taking the time. Your code worked perfectly for me and I've been able to extrapolate from that how to convert in the other direction too. I was very close to the code you've written, I'm not exactly sure where I was going wrong, but I don't care any more! Thanks again.