Strangest Thing I've Ever Seen

[goodlookin1]

Hey Guys,

I have a question about our office network. It's the weirdest thing I have ever come across and I havent been able to figure it out for nearly a year and I need to seek more knowledgeable help!

We just got a new Sharp MX4111N printer that has been properly hooked up to our network for printing and scanning. I can scan to every computer but two machines. These machines have slightly different hardware, but are pretty new and fairly powerful. One has a 2500K with 8GB ram and the other has a 3770K with 16GB ram. Both machines are running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit with all the updates current. Most other machines in the office are equally as powerful, although two are lagging behind a bit; one has Windows XP Professional 32-bit and the other has Vista Business 32-bit. These machines can be scanned to just fine.

The issue I am having is with the 2500K machine. It has one Wired Gigabit connection to our 24 port Gigabit switch and no wireless capability/hardware. Yet, somehow it is grabbing TWO IP addresses: xxx.xxx.xxx.34 and xxx.xxx.xxx.213, both on the same subnet. I can ping both IP addresses. Pinging the PC's Name translates to the xxx.xxx.xxx.34 address. I checked the MAC addresses of both IP's by using the "arp -a" command at the command prompt and they came up with completely separate MAC addresses, as if there are two NIC cards.

Our router is a ZyXEL ZyWALL USG-50 and is configured to give off DHCP addresses and currently has no static IP's configured for any end-points. Unfortunately, our HP ProCurve 1400-24G switch is not managed, so that makes it more difficult to trace exactly what is going on.

I've tried duplicating every single security setting on the box itself from a box that works, and still no dice. Disabled the firewall completely, shared and opened up the computer to the point that it was practically DMZ'd. Nothing I have done will allow me to access the shared drives on that box from another computer or machine via the network. It has been like this since the day I built it and installed Windows 7 on it. Every time I try to access the shared drive, I get an error code "0x80004005", which I have searched Ad Nauseum on the net and came up fruitless.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what could be going on? I havent looked at the other machine in depth yet....I am afraid to even start :hmm:.

Thanks for any help/guidance.

 

[Dstoop]

How do you know it's getting two IP addresses?

Two separate MACs, two separate IPs, and DNS resolving only one address all point to that machine being .34. What is telling you that it is also .213?

Also, how are you scanning to each machine, from the scanner itself or from installed software on each workstation?

 

[goodlookin1]

Boy do I feel stupid....

I cant believe I didnt figure this out sooner! What happened was that there was another computer running Windows XP that we use to keep track of our employee's punch in and out times. It was assigned a duplicate HostName! But it was lowercase. Every other time I have accidentally assigned dupe HostNames, I get a warning of a network conflict. For some reason, it was not throwing me the warning at all. The box I was working on had the same HostName but it was uppercase. I didnt think these names were case sensitive, but my guess is that is why it wasnt throwing me the error. Every time I tried tracing the hostname on a PC, it would resolve to the xxx.xxx.xxx.34 address, but for some reason the printer was resolving the hostname to the xxx.xxx.xxx.213 address......even when I replaced the hostname with the direct IP address (which is strange).

Anyway, I found out about this because I used some different networking tools and saw the duplicate names running different versions of windows.....I knew right then that they had to be separate devices. After investigating, I found the duplication error. Renamed both PC's to unique names and viola! Scanning now works perfectly.

 

[wirednuts]

glad to hear it wasnt a HACKER!