SharePoint 2003 Extranet Sites Returning "Operation Aborted" and "Render Failed" errors

Question

For my company, we have a few extranet sites built in SharePoint Portal 2003 for vendors to collaborate on documents with us. We have the database's on on server and the sites hosted on another server (so two servers are involved). However, recently they started receiving "Operation Aborted" errors when going to the site and/or "Render Failed" errors on web parts or when opening document libraries. Creating a new site collection with a new database gets the same errors, creating a new config database on another server pointing to another virtual server to host the sites, still returns the error. No data in the Windows Event logs, SharePoint logs, Fiddler results, or NETMON traces. Our networking team monitored the firewall as the two servers were communicating and did not find any issues.

Any Ideas? We can't think of anything left to look for...

Answer 1

We found this error was because of the network address translation (NAT). It had been turned on in the firewall policy and the networking team did not detect this. Turning off the NAT between the two servers resolved the issue.