QUESTION :
Our network is served by a Windows 2003 Server machine, using Active Directory for users security management. There are more than 60 machines connected on a daily basis and most of our files are stored on the server. Everyone worked normally everyday, until today.
Today we started having this very weird problem: all Windows 7 clients can’t even ping the server properly. We have already restarted the server (a dreadful thing here) to no avail. We’ve checked all possible logs in the Event Viewer but had no clue as to what is happenning. We noticed that the ping behaves specifically: the first ping succeeds but the other three don’t. Here’s the image:
On the Windows XP machines all goes safe and sound, people accessing the shares and computers normally.
Any ideas?
ANSWER :
Seems like the problem is with the server.
Hitting Windows > Run and running NETDIAG /fix ON THE SERVER solved the problem.
Just had the exact same scenario.
Also, along with these symptoms we found that the Windows 7 computers could successfully pull a DHCP address from the 2003 server and it even showed up in the DHCP lease table, but the computers still could not ping the server. When viewing the ARP tables on the Windows 7 computers we found that the IP of the server was listed twice and each instance had a different MAC address.
This turned out to be caused by the ARP proxy on the inside interface of our ASA5505. When ARP proxy was disabled, our three new Windows 7 machines immediately started talking to the server.