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Help please: Connections to my server keep dropping!


JasonGW

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Ok, knowing that you have multiple static IPs assigned to you makes all the difference in the world. I had ASSumed that you were only provisioned one :blushing:

Providing that you are using an unmanaged (or dumb) switch - your typical consumer level switch - then it should make no difference whether or not you use it. I still contend that you should configure a default gateway on all possible interfaces and hopefully this will make a difference for you.

Give the internal interface of your server a default gateway of the WRT54. Give the WRT54 a default gateway of the routers internal address. Personally, I would use the WRT54 as a DHCP server for your clients since it's on the same subnet. I don't know for certain that Linksys products will forward DHCP traffic (broadcast) between subnets. And even if it does, it's totally unnecessary. You can still configure it to assign DNS server assignments to your server.

I don't know if I mentioned this in a previous post or not, but I've experienced difficulties when a default gateway is not assigned where one would normally be expected. Even if you feel as though it's not necessary, like traffic should never need to flow in that path, it definately makes a difference. Remember, you're dealing with all kinds of different vendor equipment here between server, router, NICs and so on. Not all networking hardware manufacturers are equal in the way they do things. So I always make it a practice to dot all my I's cross all my T's.

Thanks. My switch is indeed a dumb switch, and works just fine for what I need it to do. My server's internal NIC's GW was previously pointed to the WRT54G, (as are all the clients, as defined in the DHCP scope), but with the external IP's default gateway also set I was experiencing horrible connectivity problems even staying connected via RDP. Once I removed the internal gateway those problems disappeared. I tried at first removing the external gateway, but then none of my dev team folks could log into the server, which prevented everyone from having access to files for any of our projects.

As reported above, DHCP *does* work from the server to clients over both Wifi and physical ports, but even so I've taken your recommendation and moved DHCP to the WRT54G and disabled it on the server.

The one thing I haven't tried (but will tonight when I get home from work) is pointing the WRT54G's default gateway to the internal IP of the WRT54G itself. Are you sure that's a good idea, though? It's currently set to the default gateway for my ISP, since the WRT54G is doing all my routing functions. I'm somewhat worried that it could cause some kind of loop or something, but I dunno. I'll try it and see what the hell happens :).

I've previous attempted to have the router forward FTP and other requests to the server directly, but that met with minimal success. Ugh.

Jason

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My mistake.. when I was composing my previous response I thought your DSL modem was a router. In other words I figured the WRT54 to be acting more as a switch/AP with routing functions turned off. I wasn't able to refer to the diagram while writing the response. Indeed you are right, that would create a loop condition.

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My mistake.. when I was composing my previous response I thought your DSL modem was a router. In other words I figured the WRT54 to be acting more as a switch/AP with routing functions turned off. I wasn't able to refer to the diagram while writing the response. Indeed you are right, that would create a loop condition.

No worries. Any other clues? Still happening, even after moving the **** DHCP over to the WRT54G. Have you tried any of those open source firmware swaps? Any idea if they're any good?

Jason

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I haven't tried any of them personally because I really haven't found a need for any of the things which they allow. However, if I screw something up then there goes my telephone and my wife's internet access :P So I'm just sticking with stock.

I'm pretty much at a loss for suggestions without being able to actually sit down in front of your machines personally. The only thing I can come up with is to set the QoS level to 0 in the default GPO. Or even disable QoS completely across your Windows machines. I seriously doubt that it would improve the situation, but thought I'd at least throw it out to you.

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My mistake.. when I was composing my previous response I thought your DSL modem was a router. In other words I figured the WRT54 to be acting more as a switch/AP with routing functions turned off. I wasn't able to refer to the diagram while writing the response. Indeed you are right, that would create a loop condition.

No worries. Any other clues? Still happening, even after moving the **** DHCP over to the WRT54G. Have you tried any of those open source firmware swaps? Any idea if they're any good?

Jason

OK, here's something I'm trying and I'll see if that helps or not: I've removed DHCP from the router and put it back on the server, but what I've done is modify the scope so that the clients point solely to the internal server for DNS, with the router as nothing but the gateway. I've also setup the server to do DNS forwarding (hopefully the router will let the DNS server forward requests, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't...) so that all DNS activity should be directed to the internal server first and foremost.

I'll report back on if that helps.

Jason

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If your Windows clients are members of the active directory domain the server is hosting, then they should absolutely point to the server (servers if you had more than one AD DC) for DNS. You could accomplish this with the router acting as a DHCP server. You'd just assign the DNS to point only to the server. If you previously had the first DNS server assignment pointing to something other than your own server, I could certainly see that causing grief for you. As a side issue, pointing to a DNS server outside of your AD domain could have negative security implications.

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If your Windows clients are members of the active directory domain the server is hosting, then they should absolutely point to the server (servers if you had more than one AD DC) for DNS. You could accomplish this with the router acting as a DHCP server. You'd just assign the DNS to point only to the server. If you previously had the first DNS server assignment pointing to something other than your own server, I could certainly see that causing grief for you. As a side issue, pointing to a DNS server outside of your AD domain could have negative security implications.

Well, the bad news is that it's made zero difference, *sigh*. My clients all point solely to my AD server for DNS and still, disconnection happens every 30 seconds or so. Very freaking annoying.

Jason

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  • 4 weeks later...

Okay, No offense to anyone trying to help solve this issue, but i'm reading along, and ever since the "Network Topology" post, I think most people have kind of gotten off topic.

I"M having the same issue with a customer's network. Their topology is very simple. SBS 2003 Premium server as an edge server (with ISA 2004) There's 2 Nics in this thing. 1 is connected to the modem, the other to the network switch. Server is the Router, DHCP server, AD, Firewall, SharePoint, Exchange server.

All clients are running Gigabit WIRED ethernet with Cat6 cabling. I used the CEICW to setup the server and DHCP server, so all gateway and DNS servers connect using settings obtained by the server. (server is gateway AND DNS)

My Documents Redirection is turned on, but SOME clients get the "You are no longer connected to 'SERVER'." error message.

I'm supposing this is more of a connection time out issue or dropped packets issue than a topology issue. Oh yeah, did I mention there are posts about this all over the internet? I've tried lots of suggestions but nothing seems to be fixing it. Funny how an issue like this can exist with NO response from Microsoft.

Hope this helps to troubleshoot.

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