What the $%@?!

I am pretty much in a full-time telecommuting work environment for my employer. It’s actually been a great experience for me, and I feel I am producing quality work output for my employer. All-in-all, I believe it to be a great arrangement for both myself and my employer. But all is not well in Telecommute-opolis.

Our enterprise underwent a very lengthy (and somewhat painful) transition from one type of VPN system to another. I have to admit, I yearned for the old system, as I felt I could do much more with it, but I also understood that one of the big drivers for the switchover was increased security, and that is hard to argue with.

Our Microsoft Exchange-based e-mail system also underwent some big changes just prior to the VPN change. Perhaps the biggest change in that area was the introduction of an e-mail archiving solution, based on Zantaz from Autonomy. Part of that migration involved the mass importation (and then elimination) of Outlook Personal Folder (PST) files. Outlook was even modified to prevent it from even being able to read from or write to PST files. So under this new system, you must archive any piece of e-mail (regardless of folder) you wish to retain past 60 days. If you don’t, it will be purged from the system.

Fast forward to today, and I find myself having some major problems with our archiving system. And this is proving to be one of those “Now you see it, now you don’t” problems which are near impossible to resolve. And from the looks of it, the root cause of the problem may just be my ISP. And the strange part is that I’ve been with this ISP since late November when I move to Tulsa, and did not have this issue until a couple of weeks ago. Now… it’s almost a given that the problem will occur every day.

The problem itself is this: When connected to my company’s new VPN solution, I cannot open archived messages. I spent hours doing packet captures using Wireshark and having a network analyst at our parent company examine them. His conclusion is that certain packets are getting truncated due to some type of MTU problem, which is interfering with the authentication handshake that takes place when opening an archived message. If you are a hardcore LAN/WAN person and that sounded funny, apologies, I will be the first to admit that I have a lot to learn in network analysis and design.

And I appear to be the only one having the problem, which makes it all the more frustrating. So I did some more digging on the issue, and decided to see if the problem truly was my ISP. For example, a couple weekends ago, I took my work laptop with me when we visited my in-laws in Oklahoma City. My father-in-law has AT&T DSL (part of his “UVerse” package). I connected up and found that I still could not open archived messages. “Ah-Ha” I thought to myself, perhaps my ISP is not the real issue. Still, further research was needed.

When I got home, I went over to a nearby Panera Bread and connected to their free Wi-Fi. Suddenly, I found that I could open archived messages. Great, nothing like inconsistent results to confound me even more. Next, I borrowed my wife’s Sprint Wireless Broadband card. Again, I found I was able to open archived messages in Outlook. And that is just so odd, given that the wireless broadband card is ultra slow compared to the connection I have from my cable company. I even tried bypassing my router and going straight into the cable modem, thinking perhaps my router was doing something. No dice — I still couldn’t open archived messages.

Best as I can figure it, given that I didn’t have this type of problem for three months with this ISP, they must have made a change on their end that is causing the problem. If I had to guess, and this is purely conjecture here, I would say that they are doing some kind of new packet shaping and/or bandwidth management that happens to interfere with retrieval of archived messages.

So I’ve come up with a somewhat cumbersome workaround, namely going into my mailbox via Outlook Web Access, finding the message I need, opening it, then forwarding it right back to myself. That way, it comes into the top of my inbox in an unarchived state. I really only need to do this when I need to get at attachments, as I can use Outlook’s preview pane to see the body of a message while it is archived.

But this has to be one of the most frustrating issues I’ve ever had the displeasure of dealing with. And do I bother calling Cox to report a problem? Probably not… after all, what are the chances I’d reach somebody that would understand such a peculiar and obscure problem (No offense to Cox or its support personnel). Besides, technically speaking, my overall Internet connection is perfectly fine and everything else I throw at it works OK.

What options do I have? Very few. I am considering going with another ISP in the area, although what guarantee do I have that the problem won’t persist on that connection?