This happened a little time ago, but I’ve been repressing the memory and ignoring the fact that I won’t get eight hours of my life back. Netlimiter is  an application that, the website claims, is the “Ultimate Bandwidth Shaper”. And from what I’ve heard from friends, it certainly does a good job at shaping bandwidth. In my case, however, it meant that the little Exchange host I was attempting to connect to a Dell | EqualLogic PS5000XV array was unable to communicate effectively via the Microsoft iSCSI initiator (2.07). The only error I was getting was “Target Portal Error” and some Event IDs that were meaningless. Google made a few suggestions, but the solutions ranged from “I disabled the VSS service” (!) to “HP upgraded their array software”. Yeah, right. Or maybe, when I asked the client if they had a firewall in between the host and the array / target, I should have asked the next question: “Do you have a bandwidth shaping application in between the host and the target?”. Alas, I didn’t go with my gut and immediately uninstall said software. Instead, I disabled the service and killed any running versions. This made no difference. I changed the IP range and subnet for the hosts and target. No dice. I read all of Google. Nothing. Useful. At. All. On the second day, I uninstalled the software, after MS Netmon monitoring showed some activity between the host and target, but not enough to actually login. So next time you need to ask a client a question, think carefully about what question you’re asking, and what answer you’ll get. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself wasting time chasing pointless error codes. Meh.