We have inherited the chore of implementing a fairly poorly designed software package as part of a large scale deployment to manage data for about 88,000 - 90,000 people.

Approximately 1,000 users may be logged in at any given time to manage this massive amount of data.

We are using (sadly) a Client/Server architecture with SQL Server as backend and VB (obviously) as front end. I would like to move this to N-tier over the long term, but we are stuck, in that respect for now.

My question is as follows:

In what way might I manage user connections to the database and disallow log-in at the discretion of network admins. I thought of a switch to disable log-in, but that would not log-out folks who have logged in when the system was "Available". Any ideas?