My company provides third-party customer service for a Big Communications Company (hereafter BCC). Our employees must log in to BCC's site to help customers. I have also created some intranet resources for them to use.
If they are signed in to BCC's site, my intranet site will not load in another tab or window - it says "Internet Explorer cannot display the web page, most likely causes: you are not connected to the internet..." etc.
What's going on here? Can I fix it?
Here are as many details as I think may be relevant:
BCC Site
- Requires IE
- Before a user can access it, they must install a certificate on their machine, issued to them personally
- Has agonizing sign-in process that freaks out our antivirus software:
- Popup - choose a certificate
- Popup - "An application is requesting access to a Protected Item - CryptoAPI Private Key - OK"
- Sign in with username and password
- Click on one of two links
- Message - "This website wants to run the following add-on: 'SSL VPN Relay Loader' from 'Cisco Systems, Inc (Unverified Publisher)'. If you trust the website and the add-on and want to allow it to run, click here..." (and simultaneous pop-up like the previous one).
- Popup - "The applications digital signature has an error. Do you want to run the application? Name: jpimp. Publisher:Cisco Systems, Inc. From (URL listed)."
- Antivirus software warns "C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\java.exe "process is trying to inject into another process. This behavior is typical of some malicious programs." Terminate, Deny, or Skip. - SKIP"
- Sign in with another username and password
- Popup - "This page contains bot secure and nonsecure items. Do you want to display the nonsecure items? - Yes, No, More Info - YES"
- Appears to be Java Server Pages. Uses lots of frames. Disables right-click with JavaScript.
Intranet site
- PHP and login-based, but a simple "hello world" HTML page fails the same
- Running on Apache on a Windows Server machine; using port 88 to avoid conflict with IIS
Known workarounds
- Visit the intranet on localhost. It will load when the server copy won't. It makes no difference whether localhost uses port 80 or 88. (Obviously this only helps me.)
- Open FireFox for the Intranet site (not all users have this option currently)
- Open a new copy of IE from the Start menu and load the Intranet site there. This works, even though it looks identical to opening a new window from an existing IE instance, which fails.
Is the BCC site somehow hijacking IE's DNS? Is localhost exempt from that?