Active Directory Causing NIC Driver Issues?

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Gawd
Joined
Feb 4, 2004
Messages
649
We're currently in the process of moving our PDC as well as removing some of the burdens the old server holds (SQL, DNS, DHCP, WINS, etc). The old server will eventually become soley an Exchange server. There is also a secondary domain/active directory server on our network. Both of the current domain controllers are Win2k. The new server is Win2003.

I've already successfully moved DNS, DHCP, and WINS to the new server. However, when I go to setup Active Directory on the new 2003 server, it appears as though the network card's drivers aren't loading properly. The system boots up with several errors related network connectivity. DHCP also fails to start for some reason. You cannot ping out of the server, however you can ping the 2003 machine from any other computer on the network. You can also ping loopback and the interfaces own address from the 2003 server.

One very odd thing that I have noted is that if you plug the network cable into the second, unused interface everything works fine...that is, until you restart the server. Then we get the same problems. As a note, you cannot remove the active directory role from the server until you switch network interfaces again as the server cannot connect to the pdc. I've checked all of the network settings for each interface and even reinstalled the drivers to no avail.

The only signifigant message in Event Viewer relates directly to connectivity issues with the PDC. There is nothing about a failed driver load or anything else usefull. It's already obvious that if the network card is having issues that the server won't be able to connect to any other domain controllers.

Has anyone seen anything like this before?
 
Is it a tier one server (HP, IBM, Dell, etc) or a generic white box with two nics?
 
I've had similar issue with Teaming, like SKiTLz said.

Make sure you disable teaming on the server and any teaming on the switch (channeling) that you may have. See if that helps.
 
What exactly is teaming? I'm a little taken back as I have never heard of this which suprises me.

BTW, this is a Dell PowerEdge 2600. It has two Gigabit Cards: one built-in, on PCI.
 
Ok, now that I know what it is, how do I disable it? I looked for clues on Microsoft's website but couldn't figure out how to do it. I also looked in the Network Adapter's properties but couldn't find anything that seemed related.
 
Teaming is running two nics as one, esentially doubling your available bandwidth and/or your redundancy.

Have you ever seen server clustering where you take say two servers and create a third virtual server which uses resources from both physical servers? Teaming is doing about the same but with nics.

This white paper is server specific, but it also gives a respectable overview of what it does.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx2_NIC_Teaming.pdf
 
Check your DHCP Server and see if it is holding the MAC address of either of those NICS. I know our box hates to release them and when I move a box across a VLAN I have to manually remove the lease of the DHCP Scope,.
 
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