loss of communitcation to a Windows 2003 DC from ramdom clients

I have had some strange problems with loss of connection between Server 2003
DC's and windows XP clients.
I have had this on multiple sites where no firewall is involved i.e. the
client PC and server are both connected to the same Cisco 2950 swtich with no
VLAN's or any other network config.
A specific occurance of this happening earlier this week was a new laptop
was built on the site I work at and all is working fine, it is taken to
another site where it is plugged into the switch on site. It aquires a new IP
address from the DHCP server running on the local server 2003 DC, with that
address the laptop can ping the local Cisco switch the local Cisco router and
other PC clients on the network but cannot ping the DC it just aquired a
network address from. Other clients can ping the local DC and there are no
software firewalls running. I get the same result using the wireless LAN
adapter on the laptop with the dfirerent IP address the WLAN adapter gets. I
then excluded the 2 IP addresses that the laptop had aquired, forced
re-negotiation of DHCP addresses got 2 diferent IP addresses and all worked
perfectly.
At no time did I have the laptop connected to both CAT5 and wireless
simultaneously.
I have had similar issues when deploying several PC's with Ghost and sysprep
where say I build 20 PC's using PXE boot and Ghost multicast and perhaps 5 of
the PC's fail to join the domain as per the sysprep.inf file and I find the
same thing when I first login to a PC that failed to join the domain that it
can ping everything on the LAN except the DC.

has anyone else ever seen this problem, or can anyone suggest how I might be
able to avoid this kind of issue?

Thanks.


Marcus Bentley

I'm not sure if either of these suggestions fit your exact problem, but I'll
toss them out anyway.

There is a Microsoft Patch that should resolve an issue where a 2003 server
just randomly drops off the network. From the console, it seems like the
server is alive and well, with the Network connection showing "connected" and
an IP address assigned, but you can't ping anything else on the network, nor
can anything else reach the server. Rebooting will fix. The MS Patch was
available I think back in November when we put it on ours. I can't recall
the exact KB number though . . .

Then I have also had some problems with Ghosted machines like you describe,
where most of mine won't join the domain automatically, but then occasionally
one or two might. On the ones that failed, we would look at the stack of
protocols for the NIC, and everything would be unchecked, so like TCP/IP
would be listed, but no checkmark by it. For that issue, I removed our VPN
client from the ghost image, and that seems ot have resolved that problem.
Means we have to install the client after the fact, but I think doing that is
faster than having to join the domain. (Less annoying)

"Marcus Bentley" wrote:

> I have had some strange problems with loss of connection between Server 2003
> DC's and windows XP clients.
> I have had this on multiple sites where no firewall is involved i.e. the
> client PC and server are both connected to the same Cisco 2950 swtich with no
> VLAN's or any other network config.
> A specific occurance of this happening earlier this week was a new laptop
> was built on the site I work at and all is working fine, it is taken to
> another site where it is plugged into the switch on site. It aquires a new IP
> address from the DHCP server running on the local server 2003 DC, with that
> address the laptop can ping the local Cisco switch the local Cisco router and
> other PC clients on the network but cannot ping the DC it just aquired a
> network address from. Other clients can ping the local DC and there are no
> software firewalls running. I get the same result using the wireless LAN
> adapter on the laptop with the dfirerent IP address the WLAN adapter gets. I
> then excluded the 2 IP addresses that the laptop had aquired, forced
> re-negotiation of DHCP addresses got 2 diferent IP addresses and all worked
> perfectly.
> At no time did I have the laptop connected to both CAT5 and wireless
> simultaneously.
> I have had similar issues when deploying several PC's with Ghost and sysprep
> where say I build 20 PC's using PXE boot and Ghost multicast and perhaps 5 of
> the PC's fail to join the domain as per the sysprep.inf file and I find the
> same thing when I first login to a PC that failed to join the domain that it
> can ping everything on the LAN except the DC.
>
> has anyone else ever seen this problem, or can anyone suggest how I might be
> able to avoid this kind of issue?
>
> Thanks.