Wrong gratuitous ARP sent? 1

[jmigueldelrio]

Hi, everybody:
I have the same symptoms victorv described in

http://www.tek-tips.com/gviewthread.cfm/lev2/3/lev3/19/pid/737/qid/528154

but I'm not using VLANs. The problem:
1) after resource group failover, arp caches on the nodes of the LAN are updated correctly (with the MAC of the resource group's new owner)
2) some minutes later, "someone" tells the nodes the resource group's virtual IP belongs to the original node (arp caches are updated with the previous owner's MAC).
Any idea?
Regards.

 

[flaurijssens]

What I've seen, is that the failed node still broadcasts arp requests for the client over the network. When a client receives those requests, it updates its arp cache immediately with the wrong MAC address for the cluster IP. Our first workaround for this issue was to reboot the failed node. After a while, we found out that disabling and enabling the cluster network card did the trick as well.

I've done quite a few searches on the internet on this, the only thing I´ve found so far that those cases had in common is the network card: Broadcom gigabit NICs.

I suspect the driver of those NICs (or the teaming driver, perhaps) causes this behaviour.

 

[flaurijssens]

We were able to solve the problem.

On this particular cluster, both nodes had two Broadcom Gigabit Fiber NICs. On each node, both NICs were teamed in a failover configuration.

We removed the teaming software entirely (uninstalled all Broadcom software in Add/Remove Programs) and removed the teaming protocol driver from the Network Connection settings. Then, we disabled one NIC on each node.

Failover works as expected now.