Unstable PING Connectivity

[Dotan_ak]

Hi,

I recently started experiencing a problem, in which two servers, on the
same subnet, in the same cabinet in our disaster recovery site will
periodically lose connectivity to (and only to) each other. One
server runs Win 2000 Server and its peer runs Win 2003 Server. A
simple test runs the ping -t command on both servers and shows that
after 10 minutes, ping requests will time out in both directions. 3-4
minutes later, the connection is restored, again in both directions
simultaneously.

While both servers are unreachable by their peer, they are fully
accessible to other servers in our main office. We have an always-on
site-to-site VPN tunnel between the main office and the remote DR site.

I checked and upgraded drivers for both NIC cards, but to no avail.

We originally had a simple Netgear FastEthernet switch, which we then
replaced with a Cisco 2950 device. That did not solve the problem.

I'm assuming that the network interfaces are not at fault as they
operate normally when accessed by other servers.

Any thought/suggestion is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Dotan

 

[Frankster]

Is there any chance that one or both of these servers have some sort of
intrusion detection software loaded that may be interpreting the
communication as an attack and cutting off comms for a while?

-Frank

 

[Dotan_ak]

Thanks for your reply.
There is no intrusion detection software instaled directly on the
servers - outside access to both servers is controlled by a PIX
firewall.

Dotan