Server NIC issue - ML350 G4

[Chris Bedford]

Hi everyone

Had an odd one come up over the weekend that had me tearing my hair out. After changing the IP address on a W2K3 (Small Business Server) machine it wouldn't respond to DHCP requests.

Trying to troubleshoot I was able to ping some machines and not others on the same subnet, ping in one direction and not the other - in general, those inconsistent and intermittent troubles that can drive you to drink. Anyhow I eventually isolated the problem (the NIC / driver) and it seems to have settled down to the following behaviour:

- on reboot, I can ping myself but no other machines. Some other machines can ping me but not in any discernible pattern.

- if running the latest driver, perform a driver roll back. If running old driver, perform a driver upgrade. Everything then runs fine.

- if another reboot is required, see above.

I haven't had the patience (or the balls) to try aother reboot since going through the above cycle once (one roll back followed by one upgrade). I plan to (after hours, I suppose another fun weekend coming up) disable the on-board LAN, insert a third party NIC and hope like blazes it works in the ProLiant and that the drivers work under W2K3. Haven't been able to lay my hands on an HP server adapter (but those are hideously expensive anyway, and since this is a small network and an old server I'm hoping to get away with a D-Link).

So I was just wondering if anyone has had any similar experiences? And /or if anyone thinks this might be the kind of "hardware" call I could get away with handing to HP under post-warranty carepack? This is the 2nd replacement motherboard this machine has had in 3 years, last replacement only last November. It's an ML350 G4p with a dual-core Xeon 3.0, quite a serious bit of hardware when it was bought 3 years ago!

[Chris Bedford]

I see this strikes no chords with anyone. It appears to be founded somewhere in the Windows 2K3 Server OS, since the same behaviour occurs when I disable the on-board LAN and use a PCI card.

This week the trigger wasn't even a re-boot, but changing the configuration of Windows FW/ICS service and RRAS which shouldn't affect local networking *at all*.

Starting to look like this computer is going to have to be re-installed, but I will try to avoid that until it is replaced with new hardware. Don't need to go through re-creating a Domain Controller from scratch in one night, more than once!