ugh…….

Demonstrating a product can be a love/hate relationship. BillG knows this first hand from the famous and quite public Comdex 1998 USB Crash.

I like demos. In fact I prefer demos to all of the slides because, when they work, they seem to communicate MUCH better than a PowerPoint slide ever could. I am pretty darn good at cutting slides in favor of demos and that is the way I like it.

But when demos fail, they just leave you feeling blah….

I have had 3 webcasts in the past week and at least one demo failed in each one. In my most recent webcast, EVERY demo failed. I tried to recover but I realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t going to happen so I pressed on. I have committed to posting a video of the working demo so everyone can see what it is supposed to do.

I am going to cheat a little…..

I have done the ISA session from this morning after least dozen times either as a webcast or a live Technet Briefing. So I am going to point you to a version of this I did in JANUARY where the demos didn’t fail.

Now…..here is WHY they failed.

We use a product called Virtual PC for hosting mulitple Operating Systems on a single piece of hardware. It is a truly amazing product. But it does have to be configured properly. In particular, if the virtual machines have to talk to each other via networking. You see….my laptop has 2 interfaces, my local ethernet and my wirless adapter. For those of you that watched the ISA webcast, I was supposed to first publish a web site, secure it with SSL and then view it.

That Failed…..

I was then supposed to publish OWA, secure it with SSL and view it…..

That failed….

Why?????? My VM’s were not connected. In retrospect I should have realized this when I pinged from my client machine and the name resolved but the ping timed out. But when you are flustered and in a crunch for time, those details sometimes get missed. My “client” machine was on the wireless adapter while my ISA and Web servers were connected to the local LAN adapter. To put it another way – if the networks aren’t connected they don’t talk to each other.

So needless to say, as soon as the session was over I found the issue, tested, and the demos went off without a hitch. I still don’t know WHY I was configured that considering I ran through the demos several times just this morning and don’t recall switching networks….

So there ya go…..check out the good version of the webcast and let me know what ya think and if you have any questions……

Cheers….

ps…..I also promised some information on SONAR and Secure-NAT…..those posts will be later today or over the weekend. Right now……lunch.