Month: June 2006

Network Load Balancing and MAC Addresses

By clusterhelp

I learned something new yesterday. It kind of flipped me out, but now it almost makes sense.   You can try this to confirm. From a client, ping the IP address of your NLB cluster. From the same client, run arp -a fom the command prompt. You should see something like this (I will assume 192.168.2.11 for the NLB cluster IP address):     Internet Address         Physical Address      Type     192.168.2.11            02-bf-c0-a8-02-0b     Dynamic   It will list other addresses and their MACs as well, but we are only interested in the NLB address. 02-bf-c0-a8-02-0b breaks down into nice little components like so: The first … Continue reading Network Load Balancing and MAC Addresses

Surviving the Windows Server 2003 Cluster Bomb, Part II

By clusterhelp

This article, Surviving the Windows Server 2003 Cluster Bomb, Part II, is a continuation of a previous article. Part I was terrible. Part II is just as bad. When the first part of the article came out, Rodney R. Fournier wrote about the basics of what the author did wrong. I personally thought that he let the author off easy (notice I am not using his name as I don’t want to influence his google-ability) when he should have hammered him. What it comes down to is that the cluster quorum (which he constantly calls the cluster database) had become … Continue reading Surviving the Windows Server 2003 Cluster Bomb, Part II

Microsoft Antigen Antivirus and Spam Trial Software

By clusterhelp

I, personally, have been holding off on upgrading my ScanMail stuff and waiting to see what Microsoft would do with their acquisition of Antigen. Well, the trial software is out, so I will try to get it downloaded and installed after TechEd. For those that are interested, here is the download link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/results.aspx?pocId=&freetext=antigen&DisplayLang=en

Network Load Balancing (NLB) and Network Interface Card (NIC) Teaming

By clusterhelp

The quick summary of this post is, “Don’t use NLB on teamed NICs.” Microsoft clearly says that NIC teaming “may” cause problems with NLB in KB 278431. This is where things get confusing, because the issue is just that; it may be a problem. The reasoning is really fairly simple. Teaming software, in many cases, overwrites the MAC address of the individual NICs in the team. Well, NLB, in Unicast, also overwrites the MAC address. So, the problem is: Will the teaming software allow the overwrite behavior of Unicast? Will the teaming software handle the failure of a NIC in the … Continue reading Network Load Balancing (NLB) and Network Interface Card (NIC) Teaming