by The other day I received my shiny new copy of Windows 7 Enterprise. Now, while new OS’s don’t necessarily drive me, I needed to spend some time on this to test an X-Windows product we use a lot– ahead of time– for the users’ sake. (X-Win32).
(Yes, I know, typical users and lots of x-windows.. ewwwwwwwwwww.)
So– off I loaded Windows 7 in Virtualbox. No issues. Connected to my office’s domain – check. Outlook/mailbox- check, mapped network drives, check. Antivirus/etc– all good and finished after a day of fiddling.
Then I loaded our famous X-Windows server on the workstation. Fired up a connection– and.. nothing. Went back to my trusty XP virtual Machine (same host desktop) – new version of X-Windows software connected instantly.
Huh.
I spent the rest of the afternoon fiddling, testing. Being a new OS, and being that X-Windows utilizes several ports (tcp and/or udp) for XDMCP sessions – I assumed of course that security– SOME security deal was getting in my way preventing the connection from happening. It was just a matter of nailing down the culprit.
Was is the latest Symantec endpoint protection causing interference with Win7? Uh.. (half an hour later)– no.
Was is the windows 7 firewall? I ended up disabling it altogether. Nope.
Was it the HOST firewall? Shouldn’t be– because another host (the xp setup) connects fine. But– you never know, so I temporarily disabled the firewall there too. No joy.
After having spent the rest of the afternoon on this, and getting nowhere- I finally did the equivalent of a male driver asking for directions: I emailed tech support at Starnet.
Within 2 minutes, I had an email reply – which suggested some things that weren’t it. The second email reply, (and just as quick, thank you Starnet) had a word in the list of “try this” solutions that caught my eye: NAT.
Yep– with my rush to get Windows 7 up and running, I had totally forgotten a very simple thing I do with many or most of my VM’s that involve the testing of client software: Disabling NAT and using bridged networking instead. And, if you have ever fiddled with X-Windows like we have to– you would know that XDMCP and NAT don’t play well together.
In my rush to install a new operating system and do some user-testing on a product that’s ‘complicated’ (network-wise) – I had assumed that the more difficult technical issue (firewall, unidentified ports, etc) was responsible – because Windows 7 was “new”. I had totally overlooked the simple, obvious thing that was the actual solution.
It’s like the adage I learned years and years ago, when dealing with funky network problems: “check the cable”.