Thanks.
This should work, i think.
(socket_create() [php.net], socket_bind() [php.net], socket_listen() [php.net], socket_s[url=http://www.php.net/end]end() [php.net][/url] no idea why the above didnīt get transalted into links)
Andreas
you could write something to pull all the data you need down regularly, say nightly. Or, you could write your application on the internal machine to connect directly to the remote database as it needs the data.