Catalyst 2950 ping problem?

I am having a weird problem, cant explain why it is happening, but then again I am fairly new to the cisco world (using their switches, used cisco routers for a long time) and this could be a feature I suppose. I have 2 servers plugged into ports 2 and 3 respectively. A pix 515E interface is plugged into interface 1. They are all on the same VLAN. Each server can ping the firewall interface, and servers behind the firewall can ping each of the servers. The problem comes in when I try to ping the other server form the other server (server a pinging server b and server b pinging server a). There is NO windows firewall on the servers in question here or any other port blocking going on between them. When I ping the other server, the first packet is received fine and I get a reply. After that the 2nd packet and on times out. This continues for a couple of minutes and then all of a sudden both servers are no longer timing out with their pings, but responding as expected. This not only happens with ping, but also with smtp and any other connection attempt I imagine (I only tried these two). The only thing that I am not quite clear on with the 2950 is the smartports. That is to say that I suspect that that might have omething to do with it, but I have played around with that (to where I thought it was fixed, but upon reload of the switch (with the config saved) it exhibits the same behavior). I could totally understand this if it was going through the firewall, but since it theoretically does'nt even need to touch the firewall (as it only needs to pass from the switch port 2 to 3) I just don't get it.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Ted

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bnews
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look for the command proxy arp on the pix and turn it off. Something like no proxy-arp.

Cheers

Matt

Reply to
Matty M

Thanks for the advice. Sure enough when I checked the two systems I was pinging from and trying to ping, arp -a showed that the mac address for the pix was responding. I had to hunt down the exact command though, as it was not well documented for the pix (v 6.3(5)) which was:

sysopt noproxyarp if_name

Thanks again,

Ted

Matty M wrote:

Reply to
bnews

Hi,

ahh good, I didnt have the PIX to hand that I had the same problem as yours on and it was a long time ago that I did it :)

Cheers

Matt

Reply to
Matty M

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