Finally! Problem Solved!

Okay, some of you just aren't going to care about this at all. Others of you out there might. I have been going crazy trying to figure out a problem at work for the last month! The problem was that the domain controller had a really flaky network connection. About 50% of all packets going out were lost. I had no clue what was going on. I thought that it was the DNS server on the domain controller going out. It turns out that that wasn't the problem. IT IS AMAZING what you can figure out if you actually put your mind to something and quit putting it off!!! I will explain...

For some reason the router gets the wrong MAC address in its ARP table for the domain controller.

On the router:

[CODE]
arp 192.168.0.2
Address HWtype HWaddress Flags Mask Iface
192.168.0.2 ether 00:0F:1F:F8:59:BB C eth0
[/CODE]

It has 00:0F:1F:F8:59:BB listed as the MAC address for 192.168.0.2, but the MAC address on the domain controller is 00:0F:1F:F8:59:BA.

On the domain controller:

[CODE]
ipconfig /all

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Description . . . . . . . . . . : Broadcom NetXtreme 5721 Gigabit Controller
Physical Address. . . . . . . : 00-0F-1F-F8-59-BA
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.2
[/CODE]

I have no clue how the router picks up the wrong MAC address. Every other computer on the network picks up 00:0F:1F:F8:59:BA when I run arp 192.168.0.2. What are the chances of another computer sitting on our network with a static IP of 192.168.0.2 that has the same MAC address except for the last letter??? I don't think so. This is obviously a problem with the Linux router. I still don't know why it does this, but I set a permanent ARP table entry in the router now, that has the correct MAC address.

[CODE]
arp -s 192.168.0.2 00:0f:1f:f8:59:ba
[/CODE]

Everything works like a champ now!