Okay, this is a little embarrassing but it points out an important concept.  Sometimes reviewing the basics can save you a lot of time and frustration.

During my last go-live weekend we cut over to a whole new infrastructure for the new HCM 9.2 environment.  This included an external web server for the e-recruiting module that is in use.  The new web server was configured and up and running and the SSL certificates were in place and for testing purposes I put an entry in the hosts file to verify everything worked.  On go-live we had to change the external DNS and NATs for the new servers so that it could work in the DMZ.  According to the network guys everything was done and the only thing they could tell me was that my Weblogic Web Server was not running or not accepting requests.

Now clearly, I was on the actual server and had tested everything so, I know that the Weblogic was working and it was communicating to the application servers.  I could RDC to the server and even map UNC paths to the other servers to get files to and from the old servers.  Clearly communications were working.  It just simply wouldn’t allow http and https traffic.

Turns out that this server was created from a completely different VM template than all my other servers.  When I looked closely I found that the Windows Firewall was turned on and was blocking the web traffic.   Unfortunately this was after about 5 hours of having the network guys looking into the problem.  Now they had to do some work but the problem clearly could have been resolved VERY quickly if I had just thought to look at the settings on the server.  Oh Windows Firewall how you frustrate me.