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Server unable to communicate with client systems on network

Avalon

Avalon

Diamond Member
Hey, I'm a bit stumped with what an acquaintance of mine has told me regarding a network problem he's having. Short of having to drive out of town to go look at it for him, I've been trying to brainstorm what might be the issue and was wondering if maybe any of you guys had any thoughts, it'd be a huge help.

What he has is a Windows 2003 Server connected to a switch along with 4 other client machines all running Windows XP Pro SP3 and two printers. The clients are all statically assigned as 192.168.1.2, 3, 4, and 5 respectively. The server is 192.168.1.100. There are two printers on the network with IP addresses 192.168.1.150 and 200, respectively. The client machines are all running on a domain run off the server. Specific client machines have mapped drive access to specific folders on the server.

The server hosts an MSSQL sales database that the client machines all access and write to. For the first week this whole IT arrangement has been in place, everything worked flawlessly. Then, clients started having intermittent issues such as being dropped from the sales database, or the sales program sudden crawling to a halt when being worked in. This happened for about a week. Then, in the second week, no one was able to access the database via the sales program. When logging into the domain on their client machine, they were also told their mapped drives could not connect.

I had the acquaintance try to access the server from a client machine directly in the run command with \\nameofserver, which would not connect. I had him check to make sure all systems still retained their proper IP addresses, which they did, and all machines including the server still had access to the switch and network resources such as the printers. We tried pinging the server from client machines, and got time outs. I had him reset his switch, and try swapping ports on the switch, to no avail. The clients are all able to access each other and ping each other. No updates or major changes have occurred on the server as far as I've been told.

So basically, it seems as if clients can access the printers, but not the server. The server can access the printers, but not the clients. No IP related settings have changed AFAIK. What sort of tips or troubleshooting ideas would you guys think to try here to figure out what's going on?
 
Check first that they are all on the same subnet, my guess is that they should be using 255.255.255.0

Check what dns server the clients are using, if the server is the domain its probably the dns server as well. Could be that the clients are communicating with one another through netbios and the server is only using dns.

Try pinging the server ip address from the clients, and do the same from the server.

Replace the switch.

 
One might suggest using DHCP since it's low overhead and your friend has Server 2003 anyway. If you need "static" IP addresses for the machines, set up DHCP reservations... this will also pass DNS/WINS information to the clients so you don't have to worry about configuring multiple clients.
 
"One might suggest using DHCP since it's low overhead and your friend has Server 2003 anyway. If you need "static" IP addresses for the machines, set up DHCP reservations... this will also pass DNS/WINS information to the clients so you don't have to worry about configuring multiple clients.
"

I love this guy... That is dead nuts right on. Is there any reason you have statically set the client machines as static?
 
Well, I finally made the trip down since the guy has been without access to his software for a week. It turns out his client IPs are not statically assigned as I had previously thought, but are using DHCP. The server is 192.168.1.100, and the primary DNS is set to the server IP, with the switch/modem as the alternate.

Clients cannot (I had thought they could) access each other over the domain. I removed two systems from the domain and added them to a basic workgroup, and they can now communicate again. Upon attempting to add them back to the domain, they DO find the domain controller, but after inputting user credentials, I receive a network error.

I CAN ping clients with the server, against what was originally thought.

So how it looks is clients can access the printers, but not each other or the server. The server can access the printers, but not the clients. This seems to be a domain/DNS problem, but I'm not hugely knowledgable in that area.

I checked the event logs for DNS, and there are a zillion errors. I checked to make sure the subnets were all correct, and they look fine to me. I brought over a spare router and set that up, plugged up the server and two clients, and gave that a shot. Still the same issue.



*EDIT*
I went to admin tools and WINS, and it says it cannot find the WINS Server. I tried restarting it, but it simply stays X'd out. Could this be causing the problems? Where would I even go from here?
 
"The server is 192.168.1.100, and all primary DNS are set to the server, with the switch/modem as the alternate. "

server should have itself as primary DNS, nothing else, in the DNS server application, you can add forwarders to the ISP's DNS servers.

All the clients get only the servers IP for DNS?
DNS should be put out by the DHCP console, make sure the servers IP is in there for the DNS server to give out.
 
No, the clients get their own DNS that is automatically assigned. Sorry, my wording was poor. I believe the clients were getting their DNS from the switch/modem, as the server is not DHCP enabled, but they were operating just fine once I moved them out of the domain.

The odd thing is that the entire infrastructure was working fine for almost two weeks when he said he attempted to add some user accounts and install a few things, so I'm guessing somehow he really borked something, but I'm confused as to how whatever he did could have affected the DNS and domain settings to the point where the domain was hosed.

I told him he's either going to have to call an MS server professional, get lucky, or reinstall the OS on the server since all his important files are backed up externally anyway. From what I gather, the server wasn't even physically installed into the infrastructure it's sitting in now when the OS was loaded and the domain configured, so I don't know if that was a problem waiting to happen either.
 
You've got a name resolution problem and it will likely take a professional to fix it. For starters the server should be providing DNS server functionality for the clients and be configured properly. Without understanding what is going on it can make things much worse by changing things.
 
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