The company I work for manages firewalls. One of our customers is experiencing difficulty with websites they host (behind the firewall).
Here are the details:
-Running IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003
-Hosting about 30 websites
-IP based hosting.
-Server has a single NIC. Private IP's are coded on the server's NIC. Firewall preforms NATting on TCP80 and 443 from Public IP's.
-Server is not currently, but has been (to rule out a bad switch) directly connected to the firewall.
-Have used a Sonicwall TZ170 and a Sonicwall Pro2040 (currently back to the 170)
The issue is as follows:
A user will try opening a url to one of the hosted sites, lets say domain.com. Their browser just hangs on trying to load the page. It will hang for a few mins before the connection times out. If, while the page is 'loading' the user tries opening more browser windows or tabs to this url (domain.com) they all hang while trying to load. During this time, the user can open other browser windows or tabs to different urls that are hosted on the same server and they open without issue. Furthermore if a different user, either from the same network or elsewhere, tries opening the problem url (domain.com) it opens fine for them. If our initial user closes the very first window/tab they opened that hung, all of the remaining windows/tabs that were trying to load this url load without issue.
Both the cable modem and firewall have been replaced. NAT policies on the firewall had been manually re-keyed to rule out possible settings corruption.
Initially we though the issue to be associated with an IIS session limit, but they are using Server 2003 and not windows XP.
Does anyone have any ideas on what is going on and possibly a fix?
Thank you in advance,
Chris.