Can you hear me now?

Everything has been working just fine for this small business's IT. "E-mail and Web site are managed by a third-party vendor on the vendor's servers," reports a pilot fish in the loop.

"Then the Web site vendor decides to move e-mail and Web sites to a large hosting company's servers -- with appropriate changes in IP addresses."

Web site vendor relays details of the IP address changes to the manager at the small business. Vendor tech also mentions that e-mail accounts have been recreated on the new server and that passwords have been reset, and advises the company manager to set his e-mail client to check periodically for new messages to confirm that everything is working.

Settings at the small business are adjusted as instructed just before everyone goes home for the night.

But the next day, there's no access to the Web site through the small business's firewall, and no e-mail is arriving either.

That's when fish is called in and begins troubleshooting. DNS? Working fine. Internet access when attached directly to the DSL modem? No problem. Firewall? Operating correctly.

"Routing problems are suspected but cannot be confirmed," fish says. "Outside consultants can find nothing. No one finds or fesses up to the cause.

"Crawl forward three and a half weeks later -- and the problem still has not been solved."

That's when the Web site vendor makes on-site visit with his tech in tow. They carefully go over everything that fish and the outside consultants have already checked, and come up with exactly the same nothing.

Then the Web site vendor mentions an e-mail message he received from the hosting site a few days earlier. According to the hosting site, the small business's Web site has been blocked for a certain IP address due to multiple failed attempts to log in.

That IP address just happens to be that of the small company's firewall.

And a quick conversation with the company manager turns up why. "Seems that during the e-mail switchover, he set his e-mail client to check for e-mail once every minute -- but he hadn't input the new e-mail password," says fish.

"After 720 failed login attempts, the hosting e-mail system had blocked all traffic coming from behind the business's firewall.

"Apparently the Web site vendor and the company manager didn't quite communicate effectively on the meaning of 'passwords have been reset' ... "

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