I opened the email with this:
It is fucking amature hour over here in the land of pasta and wine.
The local network gave me ports 80 and 443. Web traffic worked. The things I needed for actual systems work did not.
No VPN. No SSH tunnel. No remote desktop. No dial-out path back to the United States.
I could send a message through the connection, but I did not trust that I would be able to get back in and read the reply. I told my Praxis collaborator to handle the Exchange work without me for the week.
The problem at home involved DNS and Active Directory. We thought the main setup was right, but something was still wrong. I had been reading about DNS on the trip. My useful advice from Italy was to get out the giant Windows Server 2003 book we bought and go through the configuration again.
There was no magic remote fix. I was online in the narrowest possible sense. A browser worked, but every administrative path I normally used was blocked by the network in front of me.
I was still running the SimAuthor network in Boulder and doing Praxis work on the side. That made remote access normal, not optional. It also made the failure obvious. If the tunnel did not come up, I could not pretend the browser was enough.
The client details stay private. The technical result does not need them.
Ports 80 and 443 worked. Everything useful was blocked. The person back home had the server book and the problem for the week.