Brian D.'s questions

Something I can't wrap my head around is happening with a DC on our network. I am a programmer by trade not a network engineer, but I am 99% sure this is not normal behavior.

Anyway when I rebooted the DC I had a cmd prompt open on my machine pinging the machine so I could see when it went down/came back up. However the pings never stopped, so I logged into the machine to look and see if it rebooted, which it did based on the system uptime being reported.

So I did the same thing with Linux running the ping command, which shows duplicate packets being returned on every request, except when the machine was down for the reboot.

So on windows the packets didn't change much when I rebooted it, just the TTL changed.

Reply from 10.0.0.254: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
[... Machine rebooted]
Reply from 10.0.0.254: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=255
[... Machine came back up]
Reply from 10.0.0.254: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128

On the Linux machine the duplicates stopped while the machine was down rebooting. Also every duplicate on the Linux ping has a TTL of 255 and the non-duplicates were all 128.

The machine in question is used for DC, DNS, and a file Server. It is listed as the second DNS server on both the machines tested.

If I ping another DC from both those machines there are no duplicates in Linux, and I suspect that it would not respond to pings while rebooting like the other machine.

Does anyone have any explanation what the heck is going on? The network has 2 AD DC/DNS servers with no load-balancing, clustering, or any other type of failover.

I currently have a brand new 24 port unmanaged switch. Also I just got some quad Intel NICs for a few of my servers.

Therefore I am going to buy a 24 port managed switch, to setup link aggregation for the servers. However with all the clients I would have more than 24 connections.

Is there a way to create a bonded connection (say 4 cable) between an unmanaged and a managed switch? My assumption is that the multiple cables would create a loop, even if you bonded the connections on the managed switch side.

Obviously I could get a 48 port managed switch, or 2 x 24 port managed switches, however I already have the new unmanaged switch. The unmanaged switch has 2 unused SFP ports. The managed switch I am looking at has 4 Ethernet SFP ports and 4 standard SFP ports, with all being 1 Gbps.

Sorry if this is a stupid question.