IP Clients losing connection 1

[BrianH1]

I have several users who connect to a netware 5.1 server over IP, and thier connections will drop intermittently. I have changed one of these users default protocol to IPX and the connection is stable. I don't want to do this for everyone as we're planning to move away from IPX as soon as all the novell servers are netware 5.1 or above.

Any ideas on troubleshooting the server or questions to ask the network admins.

Thanks....

 

[TheLad]

I have seen this on a couple of occasions and it has always been configuration-related. Below is a list of things I have had to fix in order to fix this issue:

a) Subnet Mask on the server - check to ensure that it is correct. In my instance, subnet was set at 255.255.252.0 instead of 255.255.255.0. This was causing Layer 3 communication problems (the server would disappear off the WAN for a duration of 3 minutes or so at a time) and was also dropping LAN connected clients intermittently

b) DHCP configuration has valid DNS servers. In my instance, DHCP was pointing DNS to a server that was not running DNS. This was causing name resolution problems (including connectivity) and also roaming profile problems

I would also suggest you perform constant pings from a workstation to the server (using the DNS host name) to ensure that the server is not dropping off the network. You should have 100% sucesss, if not you have an issue. Use "ping -t hostname" on the workstation

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[terry712]

check that your slp is ok as well

slp is really simple to install and configure but so often overlooked

 

[BrianH1]

Hi Terry,

Thanks for the tip, I've configured SLP and the problems *seem* to have gone.