Unable to communicate betweent two servers, need to run ping after 5 mins

shirwaziri1_2 · ‎10-06-2008

We are having a slight problem with the connection between one of our servers and it communicating on another server.

It seems that the connection between the 2 host devices is timing out It seems to resolve this, we can simply ping from the 172.34.0.34 server but this is not something we want to do every 5 mins for ever.

Although the server blocks echo reply from their server, we have temporarily setup a cron job in our server to ping (with timeouts) every hour to put a temp fix in place. However, this is only a band aid for the time out problem as creating a cron job is not the best solution for this trouble.

Can you please help me investigate this issue. Has anyone have had the same problem?

Istvan_Rabai · ‎10-06-2008

Hi Shir,

I'm afraid we will need to know more about your environment.

Having scarce information I can only make a supposition:

The traffic between the 2 servers is unidirectional for more than 5 minutes, this is why the switch clears the mac-address of the receiving server from its mac-address-table (5 minutes is the default aging time for mac-addresses).

When you ping from this server to the sending server, an arp request is issued that makes the switch relearn the mac-address of the receiving server.

From then on the communication works for 5 minutes and the process repeats.

If this is the situation then one solution could be to configure a static mac-address for the receiving server on the switch port and vlan where it is connected.

Cheers:

Istvan

lreger · ‎10-06-2008

Would it matter that his internet network is 172.34.x.x

The private ip ranges are 172.16.x.x - 172.31.x.x

Have you turned off the power managament setting on your NIC cards?