🚀 go-pugleaf

Several people have posted that, on Win2K or WinXP, they are getting
ERROR_NO_CONNECTION (668) from RasDial() immediately when attempting
to dial an outbound connection. The same thing happened to me.

***Short answer: Initialize *lphRasConn to NULL before calling
RasDial(). It then works as expected.

Narrative:

Not having found this answer in any of those threads, or anywhere
else, I did the hack of shelling out and calling RasDial.exe, which
worked OK, but lacks the robustness of the API. I finally decided to
attack it again.

The solution is, as usual, somewhat misleading documentation.

Like others, I read the description of the lphRasConn parameter to
mean that it stuffs the referenced HRASCONN variable with the
resulting handle if the connection succeeds. So, like others, I
declared an HRASCONN variable, and passed its address to RasDial()
_without_initializing_it_first. After all, why should the present
value matter - it's only purpose is to receive the result? RasDial()
shouldn't care what's there.

If you look carefully at the man page, however, it says that this is
an [in] parameter, and that you have to initialize the variable to
which it points to NULL before calling RasDial(). This, of course,
doesn't correlate with the rest of the description, and I have no idea
why RasDial() cares what's there.

Either the man page should state that it's an [in/out] parameter and
what it does with the existing value, or correct the man page to call
it an [out] parameter and fix RasDial() to ignore the existing value.