[OT] Network help?

[Israel Brewster]

On May 8, 2009, at 1:40 PM, Jim Avery wrote:

> 2009/5/8 Israel Brewster <israel at frontierflying.com>:
>> I apologize for the off-topic post, but I figure the people here tend
>> to be involved with networking, so perhaps someone can direct me to
>> the right place to post a question about some networking problems I  
>> am
>> having. Any suggestions?
>
> If it's social-networking problems, I recommend maybe facebook.com!
>
> Seriously though, it depends.  If it's to do with Linux you could seek
> out your local LUG, but why not just say what the problem is here, you
> never know ... someone might find a solution to your problem AND
> explain how Nagios can help you to check how effective their answer to
> it was!

Nope, not social, although if I don't get it fixed soon (or find  
another solution) it might become a social problem :-) I didn't post  
it here because I thought some might get annoyed with me cluttering  
the list with non-nagios problems, but here goes.

Thanks to a recent company acquisition made by my company (Frontier  
Flying), we are now dealing with two separate networks (they will  
eventually be combined, but that's a ways off still). The company we  
bought (Era aviation) uses a piece of software called Sabre for their  
flight reservations, which contacts a central server to which their  
network has a direct connection. The Sabre server itself is on a third  
network, but there are a couple of routers that link the two (Sabre  
and Era) across a private network, so asside from a couple of routing  
and NAT statements they are effectively on the same network.

In order to be able to run Sabre on our network, we established a VPN  
tunnel between our network and Era's. As far as I can tell, the VPN is  
functioning. I can ping computers on the Era network, including the  
Sabre server, and can access and control various computers on the Era  
network. For initial testing purposes we installed the sabre software  
(windows only) inside a parallels installation on one of our Mac  
laptops. This worked perfectly. So far so good. Until we tried  
installing the software on one of our Windows desktops. Then the  
problems started. The Sabre software would make the initial connection  
and log in the user, but when it tried to download the initial info it  
needs, it just timed out. Every time. Meanwhile, the laptop, which was  
connected through the same dumb switch, continued to work perfectly.  
Every time. We took the Windows machine off our network and put it on  
Era's (different location, obviously) and it started working. Put it  
back on ours, timeout.

Since then we have tried installing Sabre on a number of different  
computers on our network. A second Mac laptop running parallels works  
fine, while a mac desktop with an identical install of parallels  
doesn't. We have managed get one Windows machine running the software  
on our network, while a stack of four windows machines that Era sent  
us which had been working on their network just fine don't work.

On one hand it seems impossible that it could be an issue with the  
network, because you would expect that to affect all computers  
equally, not the hit-and miss (but mostly miss) scenario that we are  
facing. On the other hand, it can't be a problem with the individual  
computer, because the same computer with the exact same configuration  
(including network settings - DHCP) works fine on the Era network, but  
stops working when moved to ours. We thought maybe it was a DNS  
problem (since obviously DHCP on our network would give different DNS  
servers than DHCP on Era's network), so we tried putting the Era DNS  
servers in statically, but while it worked as far as DNS went (we  
still got name resolution) that didn't help with Sabre.

We are going bald here tearing our hair out trying to figure out what  
could be causing this issue. Sabre technical support is no help - they  
just say it's our problem. Management is coming down on us pretty hard  
to get something working here, so any help anyone can provide would be  
GREATLY appreciated :-). Let me know if I left out any relevant  
details or testing we performed!

-----------------------------------------------
Israel Brewster
Computer Support Technician II
Frontier Flying Service Inc.
5245 Airport Industrial Rd
Fairbanks, AK 99709
(907) 450-7250 x293
-----------------------------------------------


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