Hi, All
I have a client running a Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition SP2. There are 4 Windows XP Pro SP3 clients.
A new accounting application upgrade now requires ICMP communication between clients and servers. This is how this issue was discovered, although I suspect it has been going on for some time.
We are having some really weird issues where ICMP communication is intermittent. This is causing the accounting application to behave strangely.
If I run a ping command from the client to the server, sometimes the server will reply and other times the request will time out. Note that this behavior applies not only to pinging the FQDN, but also the server’s IP address. Mapped drives, network shares, Exchange, Internet, etc works without interruption.
I have tried running ipconfig /release, deleting Host A DNS records and reverse pointers from the DNS server and deleting DHCP leases, then running ipconfig /flushdns on the client and then ipconfig /renew. Most of the time this temporarily fixes the issue, but not always. And eventually, the client is unable to ping the server again. Sometimes the client will be able to ping the server without requiring the steps above to be performed.
When this behavior occurs, it does not usually affect all PCs at the same time.
My client has several small switches in their environment. I have tried bypassing all those switches by connecting one of the clients directly to the main router, but this did not help. I tried replacing that main router, did not help.
I’m really at a lost as to what is causing this. Any suggestions?