All I Want For Christmas...

  • Article

So I continue to battle with Windows 8.1 and Outlook 2103 on my nice big Dell workstation. Our IT support department have given up on me, saying it's obviously a problem with my own network configuration. And it looks like they are correct. It's just a shame they can't tell me what the problem is.

For a long while Outlook has been doing strange things. It had a few days of keeping count of how many messages I sent during the day (see Downwardly Upgraded) but that problem seems to have gone away again. It also regularly loses its connection to the mail server and then restores it - sometimes immediately but at other times it takes several minutes. And, best of all, it waits about ten minutes before displaying the Windows 8 desktop notification of new emails. Usually I've read and deleted them by the time it pops up.

The same issues occur on other computers as well, both Windows 8 and Windows 7, but only when connected to my internal domain and going out through my ISA proxy server and load-balancing router to one of my ISPs. Bypassing all this, and plugging directly into the back of the ADSL modem, seems to solve the problem. So it's increasingly looking like an internal network issue.

I've checked all the DNS servers I use as Forwarders and they resolve fine. There are no event log warnings in any of the servers. The ISA proxy server log reveals no denied requests to my email host, and only one or two to anywhere else - certainly not enough dropped packets to justify the problems with Outlook. I turned on logging in Outlook and used the new Microsoft Message Analyser to read them, but I can't make any sense of the contents. I tried network packet sniffing, but that revealed nothing useful from the few bits I could decipher.

And then there's browser. Occasionally it has a spell of not being able to find sites. Today it couldn't find Bing for about five minutes yet other sites worked fine. Then it couldn't find the MSDB Blogs site. Other days it can't find anything for several minutes, then it all starts working again. Yet everything else seems to work just fine. My internet radio plays radio, Lync links, Team Foundation Server serves, and News has the up to date news.

I've tried disconnecting the modem for the cable ISP connection and just using ADSL to a different ISP, and vice versa. I've run network diagnostics and DNS validation checks. I've monitored the performance of the ISA 2006 server, and double-checked all the rules. I've played with the routing tables in the separate hardware load balancer. I tried specifying the proxy server settings manually in the browser. All to no avail.

Maybe my network is just too complicated. It's left over from the days when I was an IT consultant (well, jumped-up writer and occasional conference speaker actually) when I needed lots of infrastructure for developing and testing the few applications I built for customers. And, I guess, because I enjoyed playing with hardware. Perhaps it's time to review that decision. Do I actually need:

  • A file server
  • A Hyper-V host
  • A cold-swap backup Hyper-V host
  • An ISA server
  • A web server
  • A SQL Server
  • A domain with three domain controllers
  • A 24-port switch, three 4 port switches, and 300 yards of Cat-5
  • A wireless access point
  • Load-balanced routing to two ISPs
  • A NAS, a backup NAS, and two more for archiving

...just to use Word, Visio, and Visual Studio? Probably not. And all of a sudden I can see why my electricity bill is so high.

Perhaps my Christmas present to myself will be a nice hardware firewall that I can just plug everything else into and forget about it...