It is very frustrating when you I am developing a web application on my development desktop and when I try to test it by accessing it from another machine, I get the message Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage in Internet Explorer or Oops! This link appears broken in Google Chrome or Network Timeout, The server at x.x.x.x is taking too long to respond in FireFox. Internet Explorer offers Diagnose Connection Probelm button.
Prior to IE7 everytime I used this option, i never used to get any meaningful help from diagnostics. Well on IE8 on Windows7 i was happy to see how much useful information it gave me when I let this tool try to diagnose the issue for me. Right from the first dialogbox I figured that it is firewall issue. See the screenshot below. See how clear the descriptions is about the solution to the problem. It even gets better when you let it diagnose it further. It did find out that target web server is definitely online but is refusing connections.
Just by using the diagnostics tool in Internet Explorer 8 I was able to fix the issue in no time. I went to my server machine, punched the whole in FireWall to allow incoming traffic on Port 80 and I was on my way.
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