Unable to ping some machines - others ok???

[Brad Pears]

We are working on setting up one of our saleperson's laptop with an
application that requires it to connect to our Windows 2000 SQL server.

The laptop has XP Home installed. We were having problems connecting and
decided to attempt to ping the machine to troubleshoot the issue. We were
unable to ping the SQL server by name or IP address. When we ping by name,
the IP address is returned but it just times out. We were however,
successfully able to ping other machines on the LAN no probs. Then we
happened to try my XP Pro machine, and was unable to ping it as well!!! My
firewall is not turned on. and other machines can ping mine with no issues.

What should we be doing to try to troubleshoot this issue?? Why would it be
able to ping some machines and not others on the LAN??

Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Brad

 

[Gary]

What is:
The IP Address of the laptop
The subnet of the laptop
The default gateway of the laptop

The IP Address of the SQL server
The subnet of the SQL server
The default gateway of the server

 

[Brad Pears]

See my responses below... IP addresses etc.. THe laptop is beign assigned
using DHCP - while the server is static.

What is:
The IP Address of the laptop: 192.168.2.47
The subnet of the laptop: 255.255.255.0
The default gateway of the laptop: 192.168.2.2

The IP Address of the SQL server: 192.168.2.20

The subnet of the SQL server: 255.255.255.0

 

[Gary]

The IP address and subnet looks ok. Is there a firewall installed or turned
on at the SQL server?

 

[Brad Pears]

Nope, we have a firewall appliance (Watchguard Firebox) installed. all other
machines can ping this box no probs... I wonder if it's a piece of softrware
on his Dell laptop causing the issue... This is a bizarre one. As another
test, I connected up another XP Home laptop and had no probs pinging the SQL
server... It seems to be his laptop only!!!

The SQL server has enable NetBIOS over TCP enabled. That should not cause an
issue should it?

 

[Gary]

The NetBIOS on the SQL is not a problem.

Try opening a command prompt and typing "tracert 192.168.2.20"

 

[Steven L Umbach]

Try booting into Safe Mode with networking on the laptop to see if that
makes a difference. If that works then some application or service on the
laptop is filtering outbound traffic. Another possibility is some of your
computers have an ipsec policy that allows access from only specific IP
addresses. You could boot your XP Pro computer into Safe Mode with
networking to see if he can ping your computer then. Beyond that I would
resort to network tracing with something like Ethereal to both the source
[laptop] and destination computer [your XP Pro computer] to see what is
going on at the packet level. --- Steve