D
Doug the Desert Tripper
Hello Windows Gurus,
I was called out on a consulting run today to a diesel repair shop.
The site admin. was a kid who was a friend of the owner but wasn't
necessarily a networking expert, and the shop owner called me in to
fix things. I'm pretty new to 2003 but recently completed my MCSE in
2000, so I thought it might be something I could handle. The network
consisted of a Dell Win2K3 server, four clone workstations running XP,
and a shared connection to a DSL router, all plugged into a Dell
16-port non-managed switch.
The business is allotted 5 static IPs through the DSL ISP, so they
decided to assign a static IP to each of the 4 workstations and the
server. The router does support DHCP assignments; however, there is a
need for the server to have a static IP. The 2K3 server is a
file/print server for Quickbooks Pro as well as a web server
supporting 5 external Web sites using the same IP but different port
#s.
The server was assigned x.x.x.145, and the workstations were assigned
x.x.x.146 through x.x.x.149. The router was x.x.x.150. Subnet mask was
255.255.255.248.
Here's where it gets interesting. When the server is down, the
workstations can talk to each other and the router just fine! But
bring the server up... and the workstations go down at random, giving
an IP address conflict message. Event Viewer on the workstations gives
a MAC address which I traced to the server NIC. The server's Event
Viewer indicates nothing!! Even stranger, any attempt to "Ping" these
phantom addresses from a working workstation times out. The only roles
running on the server are File/Print, DNS, and IIS. I checked all the
other things I could think of - NAT, VPN server, etc. but none are
turned on. I did an integrity check on the AD database and it fixed a
small error in the semantic database analysis part (didn't appear to
affect the problem though.)
From seeing how the kid troubleshot a workstation, I got the
impression that he likes to go into the "Advanced" settings of things
and change settings at random in hopes that something will work. I
suspect that's what he did on the server but have no idea where to
begin to look.
Thanks very much for any input!
Doug
I was called out on a consulting run today to a diesel repair shop.
The site admin. was a kid who was a friend of the owner but wasn't
necessarily a networking expert, and the shop owner called me in to
fix things. I'm pretty new to 2003 but recently completed my MCSE in
2000, so I thought it might be something I could handle. The network
consisted of a Dell Win2K3 server, four clone workstations running XP,
and a shared connection to a DSL router, all plugged into a Dell
16-port non-managed switch.
The business is allotted 5 static IPs through the DSL ISP, so they
decided to assign a static IP to each of the 4 workstations and the
server. The router does support DHCP assignments; however, there is a
need for the server to have a static IP. The 2K3 server is a
file/print server for Quickbooks Pro as well as a web server
supporting 5 external Web sites using the same IP but different port
#s.
The server was assigned x.x.x.145, and the workstations were assigned
x.x.x.146 through x.x.x.149. The router was x.x.x.150. Subnet mask was
255.255.255.248.
Here's where it gets interesting. When the server is down, the
workstations can talk to each other and the router just fine! But
bring the server up... and the workstations go down at random, giving
an IP address conflict message. Event Viewer on the workstations gives
a MAC address which I traced to the server NIC. The server's Event
Viewer indicates nothing!! Even stranger, any attempt to "Ping" these
phantom addresses from a working workstation times out. The only roles
running on the server are File/Print, DNS, and IIS. I checked all the
other things I could think of - NAT, VPN server, etc. but none are
turned on. I did an integrity check on the AD database and it fixed a
small error in the semantic database analysis part (didn't appear to
affect the problem though.)
From seeing how the kid troubleshot a workstation, I got the
impression that he likes to go into the "Advanced" settings of things
and change settings at random in hopes that something will work. I
suspect that's what he did on the server but have no idea where to
begin to look.
Thanks very much for any input!
Doug