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I have a setup which is essentially two networks, running 90% windows on an ip 4 lan.

The main setup is behind a Zywall 35 and is a 192.168.0.x range

There are three servers that all share a secondary network, this network allows access to a storage device. All servers have a secondary nic card and the network is of range 192.168.200.x

I am having issues with cross pollination, occasionally when trying to access a server there is a delay. I can replicate the delay with ping. Basically if I ping to 'serverA' it will occasionally attempt to ping the servers 192.168.200.101 address when it should be connecting to 192.168.0.200

I am thinking that this is an issue in the way that the network cards are configured, but I cannot see anything obviously wrong - any ideas?

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what does your routing table look like? i.e route print Do you have more then one default gateway configured on the server that's having issues? – Nick Kavadias Jul 22 '10 at 7:38
Are you pinging serverA from the client network and using server name rather than ip address? If you ping the 192.168.0.200 ip address does it work quickly? Basically it sounds like a dns issue to me whereby serverA is returning the ip address of the storage network address rather than the 'public' network address. – kaerast Jul 22 '10 at 9:49

1 Answer

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It sounds, to me, like you're saying that client computers periodically receive name-to-address mappings that resolve to the "secondary" IP addresses of the server computers.

You should turn off DNS registration on the server computer NICs attached to the "secondary" network and delete any A records they've already registered into DNS for their "secondary" network IP addresses. Untick the "Register this connection's address in DNS" box on the "DNS" tab of the "Advanced" properties of the "TCP/IP" protocol for the given NIC and you'll be set.

If you want the server computers to resolve each other's names to their "secondary" IP address you can either use the local "HOSTS" file on each server or setup a DNS server with zones and "@" records for each server's "secondary" IP address and a forwarded back to your central DNS server specified. (Here's another place where BIND's "views" functionality would be a big win in Windows DNS...)

If you're using WINS and doing NetBIOS name resolution you'll have a harder time of this because, to my knowledge, a multi-homed server always registers all of the IPs with NICs bound to the "Client for Microsoft Networks" with the WINS server. You'd have to unbind "Client for Microsoft Networks" from those "secondary" NICs to get that behaviour to stop.

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