When pinging falls on deaf ears
I can't ping my router from one of my NT servers. I can ping all other machines on the subnet. For example, if the router is 10.1.1.1 and another machine is 10.1.1.8 and my machine is 10.1.1.40, I can ping the other machine from my machine but can't ping the router from my machine. I can ping the router from any other machine.
Felix Edosomwan
Check the IP configuration of the machine you can't ping the router against one of the other machines on the network. It could be something as simple as a different default gateway or even a missing one. If this doesn't work, try updating the driver for your network card or reapplying the latest NT service pack on this server. If this doesn't help, open up a command window and execute the "Route Print" command. This will give you a text listing of all the IP routes that the server recognizes. Execute this same command on the workstation/server that can successfully ping the router and see if you notice any differences. As a last resort, remove the IP protocol from the worsktation, reboot, reinstall and reconfigure the IP protocol.
If you're still having problems, borrow a protocol analyzer to see why the router isn't responding to the ping request from the NT server. This may seem extreme, but it's the one tool that will give you an idea of what's causing the problem. I had a situation several years ago where a bank network was locking up every few minutes. After running a protocol analyzer on the network for less than five minutes, I noticed a pattern of communications that were abnormal. The tool helped me identify an NLM on one of the Novell servers that was essentially doing a broadcast storm.
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