fun with tech support

today was a fun morning spent on the phone with a vendor.  they had it in their crazy heads that there was something wrong with the network.  they kept wanting to argue with me.  i even told them i tried to connect locally from the server to the application and she says… “i still think it is the network”.  so i calmly explained to her, and then not so calmly explained to her again that locally on the server i was bypassing the switch and the router and all other network equipment.  finally she started to catch on.  it ended up being a compression technology that is implemented in http 1.1 but not in http 1.0.  apparently windows update broke the servers ability to generate/send http 1.1 so the compression technology was failing.  after disabling the gzip compression and putting all of the settings in-line with http 1.0 it starts working… even through the network.  it was like magic.  i hate when a vendor wants to blindly point blame on anything other than their software.  it makes working with them to diagnose the problem almost impossible.  it feels like you have to prove to them that all of your equipment is working before they will ever consider that fault could lie in their software.  anyway i will spend tomorrow researching which windows update broke http 1.1 publishing and how to get it working again in lotus notes webmail right now they are using http 1.0 and it is working good enough to get by.