Okay I think this is the second time I've done this.  

Hopefully by writing it up as a blog post, I won't do it again. And perhaps there's some way out of this jam. I don't know. You tell me.  

Anyway. I had this server, running fine. It's main purpose was to run a copy of River2, and serve as the aggregation engine for many of my experiments with RSS. It also is the cloud-end for the FeedHose experiments I've been running.  

Everything's going great. The server has lots of extra capacity. Just one problem. I can't get it on port 5337. This isn't usually something to worry about but I have an application that isn't working because of this. So I go poking around and find out that the Windows firewall isn't turned on.  

The OS, Windows Server 2003, asks if I'd like to turn it on. There's a little warning message that I might have to restart the machine if something happens that I can't make heads or tails of. I think Geez restarting isn't such a big deal, so I click OK, and then my Remote Desktop session freezes.  

At this point I realize what I've done.  

I've now put up a firewall that prevents my remote desktop app from getting to the server. And this is a completely virtual machine, there's no keyboard, no big red switch, no physical reality with which to fix this. I think, if I'm not mistaken, I'm going to have to completely reprovision this baby. Could that possibly be. Yeah probably.