In my last post, I explained how the Base Filtering Engine service was blocking the ability for Quickbooks 2014 to go into multi-user mode. As it turned out, that was part of the answer, but not the whole answer. Two days after I did that post, the server rebooted because of Microsoft updates. Suddenly, the client could no longer get Quickbooks to go into multi-user mode.

So it was back to Microsoft PSS to get some answers. The tech that found the Base Filtering Engine solution was totally puzzled. So she passed the case to the networking group. Many more hours of testing, network traces and at one point locking out all remote access to the server, they declared the problem was because of a Group Policy Object was re-establishing the block on port 8019. But since the networking group doesn’t know much about Group Policy, they pass the case back to the OS support group.

The question became was it the Default Domain Controller policy or one of the Direct Access policies. More testing resulted in singling out the Direct Access Server GPO as being the problem policy. This policy gets setup automatically if you setup Anywhere Access from the 2012 R2 Essentials dashboard. Removing this policy from the Domain Controllers group fixed the Quickbooks problem.

I should also note that disabling that policy had no effect on any of the remote access features of the Server Essentials role, VPN or Terminal Server Access. Hopefully this will help more people in the same situation.