The Mystery of the Disappearing Packet

No it’s not Halloween come early but a story straight from “Tales of the Unexpected”.

So we have a scaled out PerformancePoint architecture with Windows SharePoint Services on one box, the PPS Monitoring services on another and Analysis Services 2008 and SQL Server 2008 on separate machines. In this environment the dashboards deployed to the SharePoint server talk directly to the Analysis Server but in this case they didn’t.

Because there is a firewall between the SharePoint server and the other servers in this environment my immediate thought was firewall but after, a) checking the firewall rules were in place, b) checking Analysis Services was listening on the default port, and c) that we could telnet on port 2383 from the SharePoint box to the Analysis Services machine there was still no indication as to the issue.

Plugging in Microsoft’s Network Monitor (great tool, I thoroughly recommend getting it and using it). I could see the request coming in from the client but nothing going out at all on port 2383. I knew there needed to be something going out on that port as I had checked all of this with the same tool on a similarly configured environment.

Next I moved on to the OLEDB providers themselves. As this is totally SQL Server 2008 it appeared all of the correct drivers had been installed but as you notice when configuring PPS Monitoring, the installation does like to have ADOMD and SQL Client for AS 2005 and SQL 2005. After consuming some information on the interweb about SQL Server 2008 / PPS SP2 installations (here and here) I thought I would give the latest 2005 components a try. To my amazement without even a reboot packets started to trickle to my Analysis Server on port 2383.

Now I will leave you with a blast from the past. Just one thing to note for anyone outside of the UK, this is actually how everyone dances over here. On Saturday nights the Ritzys and Hippodromes up and down the country are filled with this kind of thing.

Enjoy..!