I’m working in a large data center and have been assigned to troubleshoot and issue with a windows (IIS) web server that acts as a portal for a customer of the data center. This portal server is on a DMZ at the local data center.

I don’t have access to the portal desktop and am relying on an off-site administrator to work with me to do testing and report the condition of the portal. He tells me there are no software firewalls or other filtering configured.

While most of the remote web pages work fine, several of the URSs the portal is suppose to serve up fail to load. I had wireshark installed on the portal system and had a capture taken of one of the failures. I used IE to access one of the remote web servers at issue. I could see the TCP SYN-ACK coming back from the remote server, but after several HTTP GETs fail to get a response the portal server sends a reset.

The webmaster of the remote web server assures me that no sites are being blocked. I had a capture taken outside the local firewall, so there should be no issue there.

Another tech set up a laptop and used the IP address of the portal (we took the portal off-line for the test). The laptop loads the URL as expected. I tried having Firefox loaded to make sure that the HTTP GET was not mal-formed. Same failure as with IE.

So, it seems it is not the remote web server or the network, because there was no problem with the laptop.

At this point, I’m not sure what other questions to ask or tests to do.