Dido Sevilla wrote:
> I've written a fairly large Ruby program that is, among other things,
> a Jabber client, and as far as I've been able to test it, it works
> reliably under GNU/Linux. It also appears to work reliably under
> Windows with no changes, using the Windows XP SP2 install that we are
> using for test. However, it doesn't seem to work on some other
> installations of Windows XP that the client for whom the program was
> written has available. When the program connects to the Jabber server
> that we've set up, we performed a dump of the packets being exchanged
> between the client and server and noted that it is trying to connect,
> but eventually the exchange stops and the Ruby program freezes in the
> middle of the TCP connection establishment phase after sending a final
> ACK. Oddly enough, our local Windows test box doesn't suffer from this
> problem, and certain client machines also do not suffer from this
> problem. It seems that Ruby is unable to use network sockets at all on
> these machines, as a simple TCP client stub program connecting to a
> netcat instance exhibits the same behavior on these machines. We
> cannot determine what, if anything, is different about the
> configurations of the non-working Windows boxes that causes them to
> behave as they do.
> 
> What could be going on here? All of these Windows boxes are either XP
> SP1 or SP2 (with both types represented in functioning and
> non-functioning machines), and are using the one-click Ruby installer
> version 1.8.2-15. Has anyone else observed this mystifying behavior?
> Any hints on what could be causing it and how to fix it?
> 
> 

Maybe they're running ZoneAlarm Firewall? I once had the problem that 
ruby couldn't connect to any network while ZoneAlarm was installed (it 
even blocked ruby when shutdown!) though ruby was "thrusted process"..

hth!

Michael