Active Directory/DNS friendly router

[Crusty]

Originally posted by: palswim

Originally posted by: Crusty
It's always a good idea to set static IP's for all of your servers and use DHCP for all the client computers. DHCP reservations are okay, but if something happens to your firewall and you have to replace it you will lose connectivity to your servers until you reconfigure your firewall to have the DHCP reservations set again and if you didn't happen to write down those MAC addresses you have to go back to your servers and rebuild the rules manually.

I have set a static IP on my server and my clients use DHCP, but I can't quite tell what you're saying. I use DHCP reservations within the server's DHCP server. My router now functions only as a NAT machine and port forwarder. I believe you're saying that I should have this type of configuration, yes?

Yes. Static IP on all of your servers, DHCP for client computers, and DHCP reservations for other devices like perhaps a printer or something.

In your OP you said your router was doing DHCP which is why I brought up DHCP reservations in the quote. Ideally, the same server that is doing DNS should be doing DHCP in a Windows network.

 

[palswim]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger

Originally posted by: palswim
Yeah, but it seemed to work faster than using the OpenDNS servers as forwarders directly on the server - I kept receiving timeouts. I can't tell you why it works that way, though.

Hmmm...timeouts. That's not "slower". That's "not working correctly". Does the same thing happen if you use a different DNS server as the Forwarder? (Your ISP's server, for instance.)

After encountering this problem again, it follows a pattern: I add the DNS servers (I have tried OpenDNS and Cisco servers) and everything appears to work wonderfully. The servers appear, resolving their names in the DNS management interface and the client machines can smoothly browse the web.

But, I will return to a client machine after a while and all of a sudden, it intermittently can't browse the internet or ping any external domain (I'll receive a DNS timeout, then refresh and either the page will load or I'll receive another timeout). I will return to the DNS server management and find that the interface can no longer resolve my DNS servers. Once I take my router and place it back at the top of the forwarders list, everything will work smoothly again.

So, the problem obviously lies with the server machine, but I thought the gateway fix would also fix this and it didn't.

Thankfully, I can work around this issue without hacks or other technical impurities.

 

[Crusty]

Look at your ipconfig /all again on the server, and make sure it still has it's default gateway set.

 

[palswim]

Originally posted by: Crusty
Look at your ipconfig /all again on the server, and make sure it still has it's default gateway set.

Hah, yeah.

I may have solved this. You'll notice above in my ipconfig log, the Hamachi adapter has a default gateway as well. After reading around, multiple adapters having default gateways may confuse Windows. So, I removed the default gatewayon the Hamachi adapter (and followed the Hamachi Wiki's other suggestions) and everything seems to work very snappily now.

I love Hamachi, but I guess it has its problems, too.

 

[palswim]

Originally posted by: palswim
You'll notice above in my ipconfig log, the Hamachi adapter has a default gateway as well.

I just realized I edited this out of the log I posted, so no wonder nobody caught that.

 

[Crusty]

Each device can only have one default route... that's the point of being default.

 

[palswim]

Originally posted by: Crusty
Each device can only have one default route... that's the point of being default.

But with separate devices, each may need their own (default) gateway. It seems like Windows had trouble identifying my "default" connection, even though my physical LAN connection sits at the top of the Connections (ordered) list.