TCP/IP Routing Problem

[dangermouse1977]

Hey friendly Tek-Tippers, I have inherited a badly mismanaged LAN with an obscure problem that has me scratching my head and about to throw my server through the nearest window.

Briefly.

I have a single windows 2003 server, complete with 2 network cards.
I have 30 PC's all with statically assigned IP addresses and gateways etc.
I have an Internet router
I have several hubs that are currently daisy chained together.

I need to get the network set up so that one of the lan cards (NIC1) connects to the first hub in the chain, and the other (NIC2)connects to the Internet router.

I then need to make sure that all the PCs can access the Internet and the server drives.

As I understand it, I need to assign NIC1 an address is the same range as all the workstations. What about the default gateway??
I need to assign the workstations the IP address of NIC1 as their default gateway.

What do I need to do in order to get the Internet to work across all the PCs?

Any more information needed, please ask.

Thanks for any help.

 

[mofusjtf]

Why are you routing your PC's through your W2k3 server for Internet access if you have an Internet router?

If your Internet routers is also a NAT device that provides SPI you can just connect the Internet router into the hub and add the Internet router's local IP as the gateway to all PC's including the server.

 

[burtsbees]

He's probably using the 2003 box as a dhcp server, and possibly a DC. I thought that the server roles wizard guides you through things like that...also, I would not use hubs. They all can only connect as half duplex, and you'll also have one big collision domain...not good!

Burt

 

[dangermouse1977]

At the moment, whilst I try to sort out this network I have DHCP disabled, everything on the LAN has a statically assigned IP address.

The server install process would guide me through it, the only problem is that this is the only server that I have, and we work 7 days a week with no possibility of working out of hours.

Everything I do has to be done in a live work environment, hence my keen-ness to get it right first time.

You may be right about the hubs, currently they are daisy chained together and I lose about 30% of all the packets sent across the LAN.

It's a miracle that anything works actually!!

 

[mofusjtf]

Burtsbees is right...hubs are bad. I would invest in a switch. You can get a baseline switch for a reasonble price.

Can you give more detail on the network setup? Is it a domain? What services/roles is the W2k3 running (file sharing, DNS, dhcp, AD, etc.)?

As for downtime, there is going to be some downtime. There is no way around it. You just need to communicate that to upper management and make sure the downtime is minimal. Also, schedule it at non-peak hours for network useage.

 

[dangermouse1977]

Sorted it by removing the second Nic connection so that everything runs through the hub.
A bad DNS setting confused me for a few minutes, but everything is now working!!

 

[burtsbees]

Now start a protocol analyzer on the server NIC so you can see all the collisions...lol

Burt

 

[cajuntank]

To make sure that the second NIC is properly disabled, make sure that before you disable the NIC, remove any bindings to the card under network properties. Only when this is done, then you can diable the NIC. Having services and protocols bound to a diabled NIC might can cause issues due to remaining registry entries, so uncheck them all to remove from registry and network services lookup attempts and then disable NIC.