Can't access resources at remote site

[Malcom Morgan]

I have a users workstation that accesses resources at a remote site.
Basically we have a file server here on sight and one at our disaster
site. We failed over to our disaster site and ran the necessary scripts
to kick off our failover software, so basically the users service went
uninterupted. All workstations have a persistent route to the machines
at the disaster site. Everything is working fine except for one
workstation. This workstation can't find the resource (or anything at
the disaster site). If we give the user a DCHP leased address they can
access resources at the disaster site. If you do a tracert by hostname
it fails (host not found), but it works with the IP address. Everything
is a class B subnet. On site our addresses are 10.1.100.*, the DCHP
leased addresses are 10.1.4.*, the Disaster site adresses are 10.2.*.*
..

Any ideas why this workstation is having this problem with the hard
coded address (and leaving it at DHCP is not an option---has to do with
direct connection to certain financial institutions)...

Thanks

 

[Doug Sherman [MVP]]

Here's where you lost me:

"Everything is a class B subnet. On site our addresses are 10.1.100.*, the
DCHP leased addresses are 10.1.4.*,"

Are you saying that the DHCP scope is 10.1.4.0 to 10.1.4.255 with a subnet
mask of 255.255.0.0 or 255.255.255.0? IE. is this a subnet mask issue?

Doug Sherman
MCSE, MCSA, MCP+I, MVP

 

[JFG]

We specify workstations 10.1.100, servers are 10.1.1 & printers 10.1.3
and you are correct about our DHCP scope. In other words that octect
should not make a difference.

 

[Doug Sherman [MVP]]

Well, at this point I would run ipconfig /all when the machine is able to
reach the remote site and compare it with the results when it cannot. It
sounds like a DNS issue since you get a host not found.

Doug Sherman
MCSE, MCSA, MCP+I, MVP

 

[JFG]

But why would DNS be able to resolve when I changed IP's? BAsically
anything at 10.2 could not be reached by this workstation until it got
it's address dynamically. We only have 2 DNS servers and this host
points to both. The results are the same with ipconfig in both
situations. Could it have something to do with ARP?

 

[Doug Sherman [MVP]]

Well, I was hoping that you would find that DHCP was giving the machine a
primary DNS server which was different from its static configuration. If
this is not the case, what happens if you ping or tracert to a 10.2.x.x IP
instead of a name? IE. is this a routing or a name resolution issue?

ARP would not affect packets sent to a different subnet.

Doug Sherman
MCSE, MCSA, MCP+I, MVP

 

[JFG]

I want to lean towards routing but want to be sure it is not name
resolution. If you tracert to the IP address I can hit all hops, but
if I do it by hostname I get "host not found" . If I do a tracert with
a DHCP leased address to the hostname it works fine

 

[Doug Sherman [MVP]]

Hmmmm - very odd.

If you do an ipconfig /all when the machine is statically configured, do you
get an odd node type - like 'mixed' or 'unknown'?

With the static configuration check advanced TCP/IP properties - DNS tab.
Is the machine set to not append parent suffix - or maybe to use an odd
suffix search order?

What happens if you ping/tracert by fully qualified domain name?

Doug Sherman
MCSE, MCSA, MCP+I, MVP

 

[JFG]

I'd love to figure out what caused this, but we flopped back over to
our production site so this is no longer an issue.

Thanks

 

[Doug Sherman [MVP]]

OK, good luck. If you do not have a lot of 10.2.x.x machines, you could try
a hosts file.

Doug Sherman
MCSE, MCSA, MCP+I, MVP