Go Away! We're Busy!

There are three jobs I can think of that have one thing in common. Knowledge of this common item in each particular field is critical. If you don't know even the basics, you need to find a new job quickly.

1) Ship's captain
2) Sommelier
3) Network Administrator

I'm sure I could turn this into a Teh Riddlar submission but I'm blowing my load here.

Give up?

Ports

And so it begins:

unable to telnet with port 23nn

That's because you telnet to port 23, Sparky. Why the fuck are you bothering me with this? Go pester your own sysadmin with this. He's in a better position to use the LART.

I will not let this bother me. I have real coffay today. Actual, honest-to-fuck 10% Arabica espresso roasted and packaged by Lavazza. It came with some jar of spag sauce I picked up last night because I couldn't be bothered to cook. It was a chore to boil water for the damned noodles but the store didn't have anything microwaveable.

Sparky replied in a record 10 minutes and essplained his bad self:

Im not trying to telnet to session just testing $YourBigApp. When I try to telnet to App Server from the Doc Server which is what the Doc Server does to generate reports before it embedding, I get an error "Connection to host lost" immediately. this is the command I am using to telnet from document server to the app server telnet $machinename nnnn

Oh, OK. He's testing connections and they're not working. Not my fault for misunderstanding the problem which was described more vaguely than plans for the Iraq War. But why isn't it working? Firewall, probably. It can't be another application using the port because it's ours. The IANA says so. Who the fuck sticks a firewall between app servers though? Could it be that horrible Windows Firewall?

So I tell him to check the firewall, send me a report from that, and just for shits and giggles, I tell him to dump netstat and "net view" from each server to text files.

When I talked to the unix admin he is telling that $YourBigApp creates its port and it is stopping the connection to that server port. I need your help in finding the root cause of this issue, thanks,

What? No, he couldn't be that stupid. I look at the netstat and there it is, shining like a beacon:

TCP  MACHINE:nnnn     production.ourbigapp.bigbank.com:http  ESTABLISHED

He's trying to connect to the busy port of a fucking production machine which happens to be running at the time, thus making that port... unavailable. Because it's busy. It's already talking to the fucking Doc Server. It doesn't want to talk to him and frankly, neither do I.

Bonus question: Why the fuck this mook is trying to test a working system with a port telnet? That's like reading about a Cat V hurricane in Florida, then hopping a flight to Miami just to be sure it's actually windy there.

I know this day will end in a few hours, but it's only going to pick back up tomorrow wherever I leave off tonight.