private network for backup

[donkarnash_1]

Hello I have UNIX & WINTEL servers. I have a unmanaged giga switch and each of the servers have minimum of 2 NIC cards. One is for the live network and the other is for my backup network. The NIC connected to the giga switch have the IP address of 192.168.23.1 and so forth.
When I ping from one NT machine to another machine, sometimes it goes thru the giga switch (pings the 192.168.23.X address) and at times it pings the live IP.

How can I make sure that servers talk to each other thru the 192.168.23.X address and not the live IP address. Can anyone advise., Thank you

[Chan 007]

Hi,

I advice to use two diff networks to solve this.

e.g. 192.168.23.x - for production LAN
192.168.24.x - for backup network.

or
if you have a normal switch then
192.168.23.1 - Production Host.
192.168.23.200 - Backuphost

Use your script to hard code when using backup.
Don't give your 200 IP for any users/applications. Also ensure that no script/application uses this IP.

Chan

[Ninad_1]

Donkarnash,

I guess you already have 2 different networks as Chan suggested for your live and backup network. The problem I guess is that the hostname for both the network address is the same. So you need to assign different hostnames to the different address - like
live n/w for host1 - host1
backup n/w for host1 - bkhost1

live n/w for host2 - host2
backup n/w for host2 - bkhost2

This way when you want to ping/use backup network you ensure to use hostname as bk... so the request is routed through the backup network.

Hope this helps,
Ninad

[donkarnash_1]

guys thanks for your reply. I have the live IP address of 10.19.X.X which is assigned by IT-NETWORKS department and also they control the DNS server and so have assigned the host-name.
I got the gig switch for my backup network so that the backups happed on that network to the tape library.
So I just started giving the proxy address with 192.168.23.50 onwards. Now, how do I assign host-name for those backup IP addresses ?? Pls advise. Thanks

[Ninad_1]

Donkarnash,

On Unix there would be 2 ways -
1. Get a DNS entry added for the backup network address having say backup network host-name as srvback1
2. You can add an entry in the /etc/hosts file, if you wish to override the entries in /etc/hosts file over DNS entries - not a good way. Then you can have following entry in the /etc/nsswitch.conf file
hosts : files dns
and add entry in /etc/hosts file as
192.168.23.1 srvback1
192.168.23.2 srvback2

I am not sure how its done on Windows machines, but I have a feeling that the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts ot lmhosts is where you can define in similar way mentioned above. But dont know if it can be edited directly. Just check.

Ninad