This is part 10 retelling the end of CDFW's battles with his company's network demons. You can read about CDFW's travails in the CDFW arcs. Part 1 began this CDFW recounting his experiences with various routers and we learned in Part 2 that CDFW would rather work with routers than Microsoft Word. We left CDFW with a non-operational router in Part 3 and he learned he could recite incantations in Part 4.
Part 5 left him battling with evil wizards and he went to the king for help in Part 6. The evil wizards were attempting to create alliances in Part 7 and in Part 8 the king called the evil wizards out. Part 9 had CDFW entering the lair of the ... whatever...
"The next morning, he shows up again, announcing he was inspired the night before and has decided it's really a DNS issue. Another two and a half hours of poking around with DNS settings and chasing red herrings. Then he announced "I'm calling Microsoft, so I need a credit card." I'm not sure what happened to MY calling Microsoft.
"But ultimately, the lady from Microsoft did find the problem after about 45 minutes.
"Are you ready for this? It was Windows XP Firewall. Turns out that if WFW gets traffic from a different subnet through a router, it assumes its from a different network and blocks it. No questions. No messages. No exceptions. Can't stop it. We must turn off WFW, and that will fix it. Not change settings. Turn it off. Don't use it.
"Windows Firewall, turned on by default when you install service pack 2, and you can't disable it without dire warnings of diseases you'll catch that will make your pecker fall off. And if you are using Small Business Server, that program, by default, sets all client machines as unable to turn the firewall off.
"So it was not a DNS or authentication problem. It was LITERALLY that they were treating the traffic as coming from a different network and it WAS A SUBNET ISSUE that came about because the traffic was passing through a router.
"My problem was I was looking for a bug, when I should have been looking for a feature."
Sorry, folks...I'm really feeling for my friend, CDFW, right now. One of my correspondents, Sweetness, does research in online satisfaction (especially in online job searching and my wife and business partner, Susan, does lots of research in consumer satisfaction across channels and platforms. CDFW's problems may be unique to his situation but his frustrations are not.
More to follow...
I'll be speaking at the San Francisco April '07 Emetrics Summit on Quantifying and Optimizing the Human Side of Online Marketing on May 7, 2007. Come on by and say hello.
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