Hi, I've got the most weird problem that I've come across in quite a while. I have a rack of Dell PowerEdge servers. These are connected to a Dell PowerConnect 5224 switch, which is in turn connected to a PIX 520. There is a mix of Windows 2000 Server, Win2003 Server and Fedora Linux servers.
Everything is setup and working (sort of), in that I have all the servers I need mapped to external IP's via the firewall and everything appears to work fine. Servers reply to pings on their external IP's, website work etc.
BUT...For some reason, traffic on the internal network does not always work. It appears to be random from what I can see.
e.g. Internal IP's are
192.168.7.10 192.168.7.20 . . 192.168.7.100 etcThese are mapped on the firewall to.
8x.xxx.xxx.178 8x.xxx.xxx.179 etcIf I ssh into a Linux server and ping a local IP from it, sometimes I get a reply and sometimes not. If I leave it pinging, it will eventually reply at some point and continue to reply forever. If it does not reply on the local IP, I then try pinging from my remote client on the same servers external IP and it will reply almost always.
This seems to happen for all the servers in my rack when pinging on local IP's, doesn't seem to matter if your pinging Windows to windows or Linux to Windows or vice versa. Sometimes they reply first time, sometimes they reply to the first ping and then don't reply again. But they almost always (failed once) reply on their external IP's.
This problem is driving me nuts, I've replaced the Dell switch as I had an un-used spare and it made no difference. I've replaced all network cables and I even swapped the PIX 520. I'm aware that it most likely not PIX related but find it weird that servers seem to respond on external IP's via the PIX.
I have various things like e-mail servers and SQL servers that need to communicate with each other on the internal network and traffic is failing and I can't find out why.
Any advice would be very much appreciated.
Thanks for reading this far.
bye.