1603 router advertising incorrect ip address

[PhilKGH]

We have two routers, router A and router B, on the outside of our firewall. The routers and the firewall are all on the same subnet and are connected by a HP Procurve switch.

Router A carries external Email into the site. The email server is behind our firewall and Email traffic gets to the Email server via a NAT address on the firewall.

For some strange reason though, email packets from router A are being routed to router B, instead of the firewall. I have moved router B to a different port on the switch in case there was an incorrect mac-address/port mapping on there, but the problem persisted afterwards. This suggests that router B thinks it has the ip address of the NAT address of the email server and is thus responding to arp requests from router A.

We have a workaround by putting either a static route on router A, specificall telling it to send email packets to the firewall, or by putting in a static arp entry, mapping the email server NAT address to the mac address of the firewall. However, this is not the cleanest solution.

Can anyone suggest why a router would advertise an incorrect ip address?

Regards,
Phil.

 

[johnpoole]

post the config of the router

john poole
bellsouth business
columbia,sc