Need help getting StateServer to work, trying to decipher WireShark to figure out why

Question

I'm using WireShark to try to figure out why I can't get my ASP.NET application (which is deployed to IIS6) to use a remote ASP.NET StateServer. For the record, StateServer works if my application is deployed to the same machine as the StateServer.

I was unsure whether to ask this question here or StackOverflow, but I think here is best because this is communications related, as opposed to proramming.

Below is an image of the results in WireShark of when I try to load my application. The top 3 items in the list represent trying to load the application with AllowRemoteConnections set to 0 in:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\aspnet_state\Parameters\AllowRemoteConnection

The bottom 3 results represent trying to load the application with the value set to 1.

alt text http://www.freeimagehosting.net/image.php?2307da4762.png

I'm not at all familiar with WireShark so could somebody tell me what this means? Is there any indication why my application is unable to get data from the remote StateServer?

Answer 1

You see your machine 192.168.1.78 trying to set up a TCP connection with machine 192.168.1.61. That doesn't seem to work out since your machine is sending the message 3 times, probably due to a time out (at least the 2nd one after 1s is a timeout, not sure why the 3th one is send so close to the 2nd message, it should back off for a few seconds).

In the image you see the TCP message with a SYN flag set (See the Wikipedia entry for TCP for more infos about a TCP connection setup). However your server never seems to send back a SYN-ACK message, thus the retransmissions.

Try to filter only for TCP packets and look out for packets being returned by your server.

As for "why is the server not responding?". Hard to say from your image (especially since you filtered). Is there a firewall blocking the traffic? What is your network setup?