Server with two network cards.. 1

[bannerman1]

I have a file server with 2 network cards with static addresses of xx.xx.229.100 and xx.xx.229.101. This file server is also acting as a DHCP server. We're having some network problems over the last few days that only get resolved (for a time) by rebooting the file server.

Right now (and >90% of the time) I can ping xx.xx.229.101 from any computer on the xx.xx.229 subnet but I can't ping xx.xx.229.100, nor can I ping the server name i.e. "ping filesrv". To make matters confusing sometimes I can ping the server using both addresses and also by using it's name.

The DNS server is a global catalog server that I can ping from the subnet computers and the filserver.

Does anybody have any idea why one of the network cards can't be pinged most of the time and why pinging the server name doesn't work most of the time?

 

[KiscoKid]

This is not strictly related to your question but I am intrigued why you have 2 NIC's in the same server in the same subnet. I'm not actually sure I understand what ebenfits you get from this.

If you want to achieve double capacity to the server that's great but you'd use NIC teaming or etherchannel or port aggregation to achieve this. All these components don't require setting an IP address to each NIC.

However back to your existing issue. Do both NIC's connect to the same switch and/or layer 3/router device? Do you know if the server itself has an issue (on the problem NIC) accessing the network - i.e. do you see traffic entering/leaving the NIC when you view its status?

I would also check on the local default gateway of the bad NIC to see if that router is able to resolve this IP address to a MAC address. On a Cisco router, the command for this is 'show arp'.

Also on the directly-connected switch, are you able to connect to it and review the status of the port? On a Cisco switch, you can issue the 'show interface fastx/x' command to see lots of interesting stats regarding how the port and the directly-attached node are performing. Heck, maybe you have a bad cable or NIC. This check may help verify that for you.